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.

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

The code is available under Google Code http://pencil-code.googlecode.com/.

News

• 12 Jan 2013
  New website for the Pencil Code User Meeting 2013 on 17-20 June in Lund. For more information and registering, see: http://www.astro.lu.se/~michiel/PC2013/.
• Link to previous news items.

Documentation

The manual for the Pencil Code is available in PDF (2.3M) or as gzipped PostScript (1.1M). Axel Brandenburg gave a general presentation on the Pencil code in Oslo (2003). The Pencil Code: multi-purpose and multi-user maintained. (html, PowerPoint). Illa Rivero Losada has written a quick-guide for beginners, and Wlad Lyra has written a tutorial for setting up global accretion disk simulations. This tutorial is useful for general information.

See test results from sample applications. For information how to do benchmark tests and timings, see the benchmark page. The code has been used for teaching on a number of occasions. Some online material with exercises is available through the Numerical Experiments page.

For code problems, here an automatically generated excerpt from the manual with FAQs. Some helpful information are available on the Google Code wiki.

Wolfgang Dobler gave a talk on the current config scheme. For additional documentation see the old Nordita wiki. See also the ohloh.net pages for some automatically generated statistics about the Pencil Code project.

Download

We recommend getting the code with svn. If you just want to check out the latest version of the code use:

    svn checkout http://pencil-code.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pencil-code

If you have a Pencil-Code username NAME at google-code than use:

    svn checkout https://pencil-code.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pencil-code --username NAME

The Pencil Code can also be obtained from a tar ball (click here for a local copy r18525).

Mailing Lists

• The Pencil Code Discuss Mailing List — This list is used to discuss ideas.
• Please report bugs, feature requests and other such issues to the list of Issues whenever possible.

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)