Installation instructions here
Requires:
python >= 3.8
Simulations provide invaluable insights to plan (before) and understand (after) experiments at neutron and X-ray facilities. A wide set of libraries and programs is already available to simulate neutron and X-ray beams, propagate them through the beamlines, interact with the sample and get data acquired by detectors.
The aim of libpyvinyl is to provide a high level neutron and X-ray simulation API.
With this harmonized user interface we achieve seamless
interoperability of individual simulations thereby facilitating the
concatenation of simulation steps into a simulation pipeline.
The vast differences with respect to parameter
names, unit conventions, configuration syntax, i.e. the user
interface, is, hence, overcome creating a libpyvinyl compliant API
for each simulation software.
The python package libpyvinyl provides a way to harmonize the user interfaces of such simulation codes. It is an object oriented library; its classes define the user interface to simulation codes, simulation parameters and simulation data.
For a given simulation code, e.g. propagation of neutron or photon
beams through a beamline, a new class would have to be defined that
derives from the libpyvinyl classes.
This derived class requires the implementation of certain methods
meant to configure a simulation, launch the simulation code, and
retrieve the output data.
Since the interplay between parametrization, execution, and IO is
already taken care of at the level of libpyvinyl's base classes, the
effort to define a specialized interface (parameters, backengine and
data object) for a new simulation code is rather minimal. This structure
allows integrating simulation codes into simulation pipelines in the
above sense.
This API offers a homogeneous interface to:
- Configure a simulation.
- Launch the simulation run.
- Collect the simulation output data.
- Construct a
Datainstance that represents the simulation output data. - Snapshoot a simulation by dumping the object to disk.
- Reload a simulation run from disk and continue the run with optionally modified parameters.
Three kind of users are the target of this package:
- developers of packages based on libpyvinyl offering new calculators for simulations
- users wishing to run a simulation giving some inputs and retrieving the results
- research facility experts that what to implement detailed simulation of existing instruments at their facility or willing to design new ones
There are currently two projects based on libpyvinyl:
- McStatsScript: https://github.com/PaNOSC-ViNYL/McStasScript
- SimEx-Lite:https://github.com/PaNOSC-ViNYL/SimEx-Lite
Documentation can be generated as follows using sphinx:
cd doc/
pip install requirements.txt
make html
Please find the development guide here.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 823852.