A virtual Simons' Hour Talk by Matt Landreman - Update on SIMSOPT

Note the time: 8:00am EDT / 12:00 UTC.  Zoom link will be sent via email.

SIMSOPT is a new open-source software framework being developed for stellarator optimization, prioritizing flexibility, modularity, and testing. The main infrastructure is in python, with C++ extensions where performance is important, and interfaces to fortran codes including VMEC and SPEC. So far the framework includes several components: interfaces to physics codes, tools for defining objective functions, surface and curve objects, an efficient Biot-Savart implementation, tools for parallelized finite differences, and plotting routines. The framework also includes continuous integration with unit and regression tests, and benchmark problems have been developed for comparison between SIMSOPT and STELLOPT. Several examples of optimization will be shown, including the first optimizations of SPEC configurations. Also we demonstrate a case in which outputs from both VMEC and SPEC are simultaneously included in the objective function, so both quasisymmetry and flux surface quality are optimized.