Summary

Semtex is a 'classical' quadrilateral spectral element DNS code that uses the standard nodal GLL basis functions and (optionally) Fourier expansions in a homogeneous direction to provide three-dimensional solutions. If your problem has a natural periodic coordinate direction in 3D (a cylindrical coordinate system is perhaps the most obvious example), semtex could be a good choice. For 3D problems of this kind, the code can run in parallel using MPI to distribute jobs over a number of processes; semtex is equally at home on Unix machines from laptop to supercomputer.

The code's lineage can be traced back through Ron Henderson's prism code and ultimately to the original spectral element code nekton — in many ways the implementation is similar to prism (see Henderson & Karniadakis (1995) J Comput Phys 122: 191–217) but without mortar element patching or mesh adaptation. One noteworthy difference is that semtex supports cylindrical as well as Cartesian coordinates, and with full spectral convergence in all directions: see Blackburn & Sherwin (2004) J Comput Phys 197: 759–778 for a detailed description of the method. The user is able to include a range of distributed body forces, such as Euler and Coriolis forces. In addition to an incompressible Navier–Stokes solver, source is also provided for an elliptic solver that will deal with Laplace, Poisson and Helmholtz problems.

Please note that semtex is a research code and is provided 'as-is' with the understanding that it will be used mainly by other computer-literate researchers in computational fluid dynamics. It is not guaranteed to work or to provide correct results, and neither I or any employer accept any liability for detriment or loss consequent on your use of the code. Please see the terms of the Gnu General Public License (GPL) under which the code is released for public use. On the other hand, I'd be happy to hear of your experiences with using the code and your types of applications and results.

If through your use of the code you manage to obtain publishable results, I would be pleased if you could cite Blackburn & Sherwin (2004), where the numerical method is described in some depth, particular to the cylindrical-coordinate formulation.

(September 2015) Release of accompanying Dog linear flow stability analysis software package. This enables eigenmodal flow stability analysis of two-dimensional flows with either two- or three-component velocity fields which may either be steady or periodic in time. Additionally the package will compute optimal initial conditions for finite-time transient growth. See description of the method in Barkley, Blackburn & Sherwin (2008), and the user guide below.

(September 2015) Release of accompanying Scat scalar transport extension to standard Semtex DNS. Includes Boussinesq buoyancy. See description of the method in Hartl, Blackburn & Smits (2014).

Installation

Semtex has been compiled and run on a variety of Unix systems. Consult the user guide for system requirements and compilation steps. As a minimum, your system will need C++, C and F77 (or later FORTRAN) compilers, the Gnu version of make, yacc (or bison), as well as BLAS and LAPACK libraries and their associated header files. For parallel compilation you'll need MPI libraries and headers. Most of these things are readily available on modern Unix systems. The starting point if you have difficulty compiling (after consulting the user guide) is src/Makefile — quite likely you will find a set of compiler flags for a machine similar to the one you have, and reading it may help you diagnose and fix the problem.

I'm afraid that I do not have much time to answer routine questions about making semtex compile, running examples, etc. Please consult the user guide for information on these matters. I will be happy to hear of bugs, and even better, suggestions about how to fix them, although I cannot promise to remedy problems on a timely basis (and a big thank you to those who have contributed fixes to some niggling bugs). The source code distribution is occasionally updated, however, the code is quite mature now and does not often change.

Mesh generation

Mesh generation can be a significant hurdle to new users. The source distribution provides two utilities that can be used as a starting point: rectmesh that generates semtex structured rectangular meshes and mapmesh which will map such a mesh (or any other semtex mesh) according to functions supplied on the command line. In addition there are a number of example meshes supplied in the 'mesh' subdirectory of the source distribution (most of which were generated by hand).

We supply two utilities that work with 3rd-party mesh generators, and a link to a 3rd-party converter for Fluent meshes.

Postprocessing and visualisation

A number of tools are distributed with the code (in the utilities directory) that will aid in postprocessing. These include tools for addition of derived fields such as vorticity and energy, data extraction on points, lines or planes, data projection/interpolation and computation of Reynolds stresses.

While the user guide shows a number of visualisations made with the commercial Tecplot code, both VisIt and Paraview should be able to read Tecplot .plt files too. One can alternatively convert output data files to VTK format, also readable by VisIt or Paraview. I suggest that for simple isosurface visualisation tasks, the most convenient and quickest way to examine 3D semtex solution files is with the sview utility, coded in openGL, which works directly with semtex mesh and 3D field file dumps. Scriptable and/or interactive, sview can also generate TIFF output.

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User guides and notes

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