The Pencil Code    

The Pencil Code is a high-order finite-difference code for compressible hydrodynamic flows with magnetic fields. It is highly modular and can easily be adapted to different types of problems. The code runs efficiently under MPI on massively parallel shared- or distributed-memory computers, like e.g. large Beowulf clusters.

News

• 21 Sep 2008
  Now the code is available under http://pencil-code.googlecode.com/. Please consult the following notes to do the transition.
  
  
  
• Link to previous news items.
  
  
• The Pencilcode-discuss Archive

Documentation

The manual for the Pencil Code is available in PDF (1.9M) or as gzipped PostScript (950k). The pdf version is to be preferred because of the many hyperlinks! For additional documentation see the old Nordita wiki. See the ohloh.net pages for statistics about the Pencil Code project.

Wlad Lyra has written a tutorial for setting up global accretion disk simulations. This tutorial is useful for general information as well.

For information how to do benchmark tests and timings, click here.

For code problems, here an automatically generated excerpt from the manual with FAQs.

See test results from sample applications.

Research

The Pencil Code or equivalent codes have been used for many different applications in a (more or less) astrophysical context. Examples are

Turbulence simulations	Outflows from accretion discs	Dynamo experiments

There is an experimental web site for distributing data sets. We prepare these data usually only on a case to case basis. If there is anything not too old from any of the published papers, just let us know and we could try and put the data on the web for further analysis. Please let us know if this has been useful and if this has led to any publications.

Mailing Lists

• The Pencilcode-discuss Mailing List -- This list is used to discuss ideas. Please report bugs, feature requests and other such issues to Trac whenever possible.

Download

Go to the download form and get the code.

Links & References

• Brandenburg, A., & Dobler, W.: 2002, ``Hydromagnetic turbulence in computer simulations,'' Comp. Phys. Comm. 147, 471-475 (astro-ph/0111569, ADS, PDF)
• Brandenburg, A.: 2003, ``Computational aspects of astrophysical MHD and turbulence,'' in Advances in nonlinear dynamos (The Fluid Mechanics of Astrophysics and Geophysics, Vol. 9), ed. A. Ferriz-Mas & M. Núñez, Taylor & Francis, London and New York, pp. 269-344 (astro-ph/0109497, ADS, PDF)
• Haugen, N. E. L., Brandenburg, A., & Dobler, W.: 2004, ``Simulations of nonhelical hydromagnetic turbulence,'' Phys. Rev. E 70, 016308, 1-14 (astro-ph/0307059, ADS, PDF)
• Dobler, W., Stix, M., & Brandenburg, A.: 2006, ``Convection and magnetic field generation in fully convective spheres,'' Astrophys. J. 638, 336-347 (astro-ph/0410645, ADS, PDF)
• de Val-Borro, M. and 22 coauthors (incl. Lyra, W.): 2006, ``A comparative study of disc-planet interaction,'' Month. Not. Roy. Soc.  (astro-ph/0605237)
• The Pencil Code: multi-purpose and multi-user maintained, PowerPoint presentation, Oslo 2003)

Contact