GeoClaw Prerequisites#
GeoClaw is distributed with Clawpack, and if possible you should have Clawpack installed and working on your own computer for ease in working through the examples in this tutorial.
The core code is written in Fortran, so you will need a Fortran compiler such as gfortran. The user interface (both for setting up a simulation and for viewing the results) is in Python, and some of the examples in this tutorial are in the form of Jupyter notebooks. See Installation Prerequisites for more details.
See Options for installing Clawpack Fortran codes
for two possible ways to install Clawpack that expose the Fortran code.
For our purposes it is best to use the git clone option, since we will
need to clone the separate apps repository
that contains the examples for this tutorial.
Running Clawpack code requires using Makefiles and is generally done from the command line in a linux or MacOS shell (and on a Mac you must also install the xcode command line tools). The use of Windows is not generally supported for Clawpack.
After installing clawpack, you should
set some environment variables.
In particular, set $CLAW to point to the top level of
your clawpack installation, e.g. in a bash shell:
$ export CLAW=/full/path/to/clawpack
You should also make sure this path is on the path that Python uses to find
modules when you do an import. The clawpack path defined above can be appended
to your current $PYTHONPATH (if this environment variable is already set
to include other paths) via::
$ export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$CLAW
See the clawpack documentation on Python path.
You need at least a few Python packages for running GeoClaw and visualizing
results, such as numpy and matplotlib. There are many other Python tools
that are useful and/or required for some of the examples in this tutorial,
listed in the file requirements_geo.txt.
See Python environment with useful tools for instructions on creating a virtual
environment in Python with these tools installed.
Using the DesignSafe Jupyter Hub#
An alternative to installing software is to use the DesignSafe Jupyter Hub. Researchers who study natural hazards can get an account on the NSF infrastructure center DesignSafe and, if more compute power is needed, also an account on TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
More details to come…