GETTING STARTED

This code has very little dependencies, the only thing you will really need is an implementation of MPI, e.g. open-mpi or mpich.
Here we will get you started.

Getting the code

We will install the code to the ~/codes/bhac directory. To download the code, the following commands should do the trick:

cd ~
mkdir codes
cd codes

Using git:
git clone git@gitlab-vm.itp.uni-frankfurt.de:BHAC-release/beta.git bhac
cd bhac

Downloading a compressed folder:
It is also possible to download a compressed folder with the most recent BHAC version in your preferred format. To do this, access the BHAC repository with your web browser and click where indicated by the arrow in the following image

and then uncompress as usual.

Installation

The only thing that should be done after unpacking is to provide the $BHAC_DIR environment variable holding the path to the code. For bash, this can be done by typing:

Or manually adding the following entry to the ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile) file:

# BHAC:
export BHAC_DIR=$HOME/codes/bhac

Don’t forget to source the .bashrc (.bash_profile)

Running a test problem

To run the code, a good practice is to create a new directory outside $BHAC_DIR. We can get started with the (one dimensional) shock tube, located at $BHAC_DIR/tests/rmhd/shockTube. We will create a directory bhac_runs in the home directory, and copy the problem set-up.

In this folder, you can type

which sets up a 1D grid with three vector components (-d=13) for (general) relativistic MHD (-p=rmhd) in Cartesian coordinates (-coord=cart). For more information, see README.md in the same directory.

For completeness, the remaining flags in the setup-line mean:
-g=12 sets the number of cells in each AMR-block, including ghost-cells, to 12. This number can change for each dimension, e.g. in 3D you might write -g=20,12,12. See Data structures for more information.
-nf=0 defines zero advected tracers.
-phi=3 -z=2 sets the order of the vector components, it is only relevant for spherical or cylindrical grids. See Axial symmetry for more information.

You will notice some *.t files in your directory. These are:

amrvacsettings.t
amrvacusr.t
amrvacusrpar.t

You only have to care about the last two. In amrvacusr.t, the whole problem for example initial conditions and boudary conditions are set up and amrvacusrpar.t can be used to provide additional global varibles for your setup.

The machine specific definitions are outsourced to the directory $BHAC_DIR/arch. There you have a number of pre-defined make rules for various compilers. If you are using Intel, you should well be served with default.defs. To tell BHAC to use these definitions, type

If using instead gfortran, the make rules are written in gfortran.defs and can be set using

Now it is time to

and upon successful compilation, create an output directory

To run the code, type

This will run BHAC on four cores of your machine using the pre-defined parameter-file amrvac1D.par (-i ) and redirect the standard output to the file output/out. This should take around 15 seconds. Several new files will appear inside the directory 'output', ending in .dat, .vtu and one file called amrvac.log – this is the log file updated during computation. The .dat files are used for restarts (for more information, see Command line parameters) and the .vtu files contain the output data to be visualized with e.g. Paraview (we also provide Python interfaces though). For more information on the available output formats, see File formats.

Congratulations, you have run your first simulation with BHAC!