SOFTv2

This is the rewrite of the Synchrotron-detecting Orbit Following Toolkit (SOFT), a fast synthetic radiation diagnostic toolkit for runaway electrons in tokamaks. Given an axisymmetric magnetic field and a runaway electron distribution function, SOFT can produce bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation images, spectra and more. This version of the code is a complete rewrite in C++ of the original code, featuring a better code structure, more efficient algorithms (sometimes by orders of magnitude), a slightly more user-friendly interface and some new physics.

Documentation

The online documentation for SOFT2 is available at https://soft2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

Required software

In order to compile and run SOFT2, the following software must be installed on your system:

CMake version 3.9 or later
A C++ compiler with support for C++17 and OpenMP (such as gcc >= 7)
GNU Scientific Library version 2.0 or later
softlib (latest version)

For file output, you need one of the following two:

HDF5 for reading/writing HDF5 and (Matlab) MAT files (highly recommended)
MATLAB for reading/writing (Matlab) MAT files

We highly recommend installing and using HDF5 with SOFT2 instead of Matlab. Input and output files can still be operated on by Matlab (with the '-v7.3' for writing) when generated by the HDF5 library.

For MPI parallelization (running on clusters), you will also need and implementation of the MPI standard installed, such as:

Compilation

Once all required software is installed, compiling SOFT2 is as easy as going into the build directory and running

$ cmake ../ && make -j N

where N is the number of threads to use when compiling. Once finished, the SOFT2 executable is available as soft under build/src/. For more details about how to compile SOFT2, including a list of configuration options that can be specified to CMake, see the SOFT2 documentation.

About the author

SOFT is developed by the Plasma Theory group at the Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology. Lead maintainer is Mathias Hoppe.

How to cite

If you use SOFT in your research, you should cite the SOFT paper:

M. Hoppe et al 2018 Nucl. Fusion 58 026032

BibTeX:

@article {Hoppe2018,
    title = {{SOFT}: a synthetic synchrotron diagnostic for runaway electrons},
    author = {M. Hoppe and O. Embr{\'{e}}us and R. A. Tinguely and R. S. Granetz and A. Stahl and T. F{\"{u}}l{\"{o}}p},
    year = 2018,
    month = {jan},
    publisher = {{IOP} Publishing},
    volume = {58},
    number = {2},
    pages = {026032},
    journal = {Nuclear Fusion},
    doi = {10.1088/1741-4326/aa9abb},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1088%2F1741-4326%2Faa9abb},
    eprint = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00674}
}

Publications

For a partial list of publications using SOFT, see https://ft.nephy.chalmers.se/retools/soft/.