Introducing, Snek5000: Python + Nek5000

[Ashwin Vishnu Mohanan]

Dear Nek5000 users and developers,

TL;DR version of this message

Snek5000, a Pythonic workflow manager / API over Nek5000 has reached its first production-ready version, complete with good tutorials and docs. We are looking for feedback and to know what your first impressions of the code are. Take a look!

pip install snek5000

• Snek5000 repository: https://github.com/snek5000/snek5000
• Snek5000 tutorials and documentation: https://snek5000.readthedocs.io

Now that I have your attention, the long version

I am very pleased to announce the release of version 0.8.0 of the numerical simulation code Snek5000 (accompanied by the new Fluidsim 0.7.0). We (Pierre, Arman and me) finalized Snek5000 0.8.0 during a serious code sprint during October and November 2022 with not less than 60 issues closed on Snek5000 repository.

What is Snek5000?

Snek5000 was initially created by me (Ashwin) to make Nek5000 simulations more user-friendly and reliable. The first few words of the README give a good idea of what Snek5000 is:

“Snek5000 is a Python package which allows one to write Fluidsim solvers based for the simulations on the Fortran CFD code Nek5000. There are open-source solvers (in particular snek5000-phill, snek5000-cbox and snek5000-tgv) and it’s not difficult to write your own solver based on your Nek5000 cases.

With a Snek5000-Fluidsim solver, it becomes very easy to

• launch/restart simulations with Python scripts and terminal commands,
• load simulations, read the associated parameters/data and produce nice figures/movies.

Snek5000 can be seen as a workflow manager for Nek5000 or a Python wrapper around Nek5000. It uses Nek5000 on the background and is thus NOT a rewrite of Nek5000!“

For the thesis of Arman Khoubani, we wanted to use Nek5000 for simulations of convection on side walls. Since this required a parametric study, which in turn requires a good scriptable workflow to launch, organize and process several Nek5000 simulations, Snek5000 was a good solution. Thus, we started to use Nek5000 through Snek5000. We contributed to the package, and it has now reached a sufficient degree of maturity to be shared and be used by others, with Snek5000 version 0.8.0.

Sounds interesting?

The documentation for Snek5000 contains many tutorials and examples. It seems to me that they demonstrate quite well how Snek5000 completely changes the Nek5000 user experience.

We plan to release Snek5000 0.9.0 in few weeks after taking into account your feedback, so don’t hesitate to contact us via our chat, issue tracker or just emails. Moreover, we are of course very open to contributions.

Cheers!
Ashwin Vishnu Mohanan representing our small team of scientists and open-source developers of the FluidDyn project,
Pierre Augier & Arman Khoubani

About FluidDyn project: https://fluiddyn.readthedocs.io
Fluidsim documentation: https://fluidsim.readthedocs.io

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