Local tools: Cubit and ParaView¶

Geometry, meshing, and visualization run on your own computer.

Cubit¶

Cubit from Sandia National Laboratories is the geometry and meshing tool used throughout the ACE3P workflow. It requires a license. The tutorials were written with Cubit 16.x.

ACE3P uses Cubit through journal files (.jou), which are scripts of Cubit commands. Two ways to run one:

Click the Play button in the toolbar, browse to the .jou file, and open it.
Open Tools, then Journal Editor, load the file, and press Play. The editor lets you step through and modify commands.

A full walkthrough of building and meshing a cavity is on the Cubit page. The export command that ACE3P needs is Genesis format with all blocks:

export Genesis "model4.gen" block all overwrite

Mesh elements must be quadratic tetrahedra (tetra10) and the model must be scaled to meters before export. See Mesh preparation.

Cubit on S3DF¶

A licensed Cubit is installed at /sdf/group/rfar/software/Cubit-16.12/. Use it through a NoMachine remote desktop, through ssh -X, or in batch mode without a GUI:

/sdf/group/rfar/software/Cubit-16.12/cubit -batch -nographics -input step2-Mesh-pillbox.jou

ParaView¶

ParaView is free. Install version 5.11 or later to match the SLAC plugin.

Open Tools, then Manage Plugins.
Select SLACTools and click Load Selected.
Expand the entry and check Auto Load so it is active on every start.

The SLAC toolbar adds a reader that loads an ACE3P mesh (.ncdf) together with mode or field files (.mod) in one step.

Load the ACE3P macros¶

The CW23 materials include Python macros for common ACE3P plots. Add each one through Macros, then Add new macro:

Macro	Used with	Purpose
`nextmode.py`	Omega3P, S3P, T3P, TEM3P	Step through modes or time steps
`enhancement.py`	Track3P	Plot the enhancement counter
`resonant.py`	Track3P	Plot resonant particles
`trajectory.py`	Track3P	Animate particle trajectories
`wakeplot.py`	T3P	Plot wake potentials
`timeFFT.py`	T3P	FFT of a time signal

The macros are in the macros/ directory alongside the examples.

ParaView on S3DF¶

A ParaView 5.11.1 build with web components is installed at /sdf/group/rfar/software/ParaView-5.11.1-MPI-Linux-Python3.9-x86_64/. It can serve the ParaView Web Visualizer so you can look at results in a browser through an SSH tunnel without copying files to your laptop. See Web dashboard.