Postprocessing

There are several ways to post-process the output of Quokka simulations. AMReX PlotfileTools, yt, and VisIt all allow you to analyze the outputs after they are written to disk.

AMReX PlotfileTools

These are self-contained C++ programs (included with AMReX in the Tools/Plotfile subdirectory) that will output a 2D slice (axis-aligned), a 1D slice (axis-aligned), or compute a volume integral given an AMReX plotfile. For these tasks, it is almost always easier to use the Plotfile tools rather than, e.g., yt or VisIt.

  • To compute a volume integral, use fvolumesum.
  • To compute a 2D slice plot (axis-aligned planes only), use fsnapshot.
  • To compute a 1D slice (axis-aligned directions only, with output as ASCII), use fextract.

Other tools:

  • fboxinfo prints out the indices of all the Boxes in a plotfile
  • fcompare calculates the absolute and relative errors between plotfiles in L-inf norm
  • fextrema calculates the minimum and maximum values of all variables in a plotfile
  • fnan determines whether there are any NaNs in a plotfile
  • ftime prints the simulation time of each plotfile
  • fvarnames prints the names of all the variables in a given plotfile

yt

Warning

There are known bugs that affect Quokka outputs. PlotfileTools (see above) can be used instead for axis-aligned slice plots.

The plotfile directory can be loaded with yt.load as usual. However, the standard fields such as ('gas', 'density') are not defined. Instead, you have to use non-standard fields. Examine ds.field_list to see the fields that exist in the plotfiles. These should be:

[('boxlib', 'gasDensity'), ('boxlib', 'gasEnergy'),
('boxlib', 'radEnergy'), ('boxlib', 'scalar'),
('boxlib', 'temperature'), ('boxlib', 'x-GasMomentum'),
('boxlib', 'x-RadFlux'), ('boxlib', 'y-GasMomentum'),
('boxlib', 'y-RadFlux'), ('boxlib', 'z-GasMomentum'), ('boxlib', 'z-RadFlux')]

For details, see the yt documentation on reading AMReX data.

Tip

One of the most useful things to do is to convert the data into a uniform-resolution NumPy array with the covering_grid function.

Tip

This WarpX script may be useful as a starting point for visualizing a time series of outputs. This script will require some modification to work with Quokka outputs.

VisIt

VisIt can read cell-centered output variables from AMReX plotfiles. Currently, there is no support for reading either face-centered variables or particles. (However, by default, cell-centered averages of face-centered variables are included in Quokka plotfiles.)

In order to read an individual plotfile, you can select the plt00000/Header file in VisIt's Open dialog box.

If you want to read a timeseries of plotfiles, you can create a file with a .visit extension that lists the plt*/Header files, one per line, with the following command: :

ls -1 plt*/Header | tee plotfiles.visit

Then select plotfiles.visit in VisIt's Open dialog box.

Warning

There are rendering bugs with unscaled box dimensions. Slices generally work. However, do not expect volume rendering to work when using, e.g. parsec-size boxes with cgs units.