Installation#

Installation with Pip on Windows, Mac, and Linux#

For most users, it is recommended that you install the latest stable release of Scarabée using pre-built Python wheels from PyPI using pip. Pre-built wheels are available for the following operating system - architecture combinations:

  • Windows x86

  • Linux x86

  • macOS x86 (older Intel Macs)

  • macOS ARM64 (newer M1 Macs)

If you are not running one of these combinations, you will likely need to compile Scarabée on your system from source code.

Important

Scarabée requires that you have Python 3.10 or later installed. If you do not have a compatible Python version, you will not be able to install Scarabée.

To install Scarabée, open a terminal (command prompt on Windows) and enter the following command:

pip install --user scarabee

Installation from Source#

If you are a developer, want the most recent development version of Scarabée, or are running on a system for which pre-built wheels do not exist, then you will have to compile Scarabée from source. Before you can do this, you will need to ensure that you have installed CMake and git. Additionally, you will also need a C++20 compiler. On Windows, this means you should install the community version of Visual Studio, and on Linux you should install a recent version of g++ (you will have to look for online for details regarding your particular Linux distribution). Users on macOS likely already have a sufficient compiler.

Linux Prerequisites#

If you are building on a Linux operating system, you will likely need to install several packages using your distribution’s package manager. These are necessary to build the graphical plotting interface, and unfortunately cannot be downloaded automatically, as they are too system dependent.

On Ubuntu based operating systems (which includes Debian and Linux Mint), use the following command

sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip libx11-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libomp-dev mesa-common-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev xorg-dev

If you are using a Fedora based operating system (including RockyOS), use the following command

sudo dnf install -y python3-pip python3-devel wayland-devel libxkbcommon-devel libXcursor-devel libXi-devel libXinerama-devel libXrandr-devel mesa-libGL-devel

Unfortunately, if you are running on a different Linux based operating system where these commands do not work, you will need to do a bit of research to find the correct packages to install which will provide the necessary dependencies.

Build Process#

You should start by opening a terminal (command prompt on Windows) and navigating to the directory where you would like to store your Scarabée source files. Once there you can run the command

git clone https://github.com/scarabee-dev/scarabee.git

to download the source code into a new directory called scarabee, and then run

cd scarabee

to navigate into that directory. If you would like to build the development version of Scarabée, you should checkout the development branch using

git switch develop

At this point, you are ready to build Scarabée using the command

pip install --user -v .

This will launch the compilation sequence, which could take several minutes to complete.

Nuclear Data Libraries#

Building a Library#

To use all features of Scarabée, particularly if you want to perform PWR assembly calculations, you will need a multi-group nuclear data library (NDL). To build an NDL for Scarabée you will need a Unix-like operating system (such as Linux or macOS). If you are on Windows, you can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to completethis task.

You will also need to download the ENDF files you want to use for your library. There are many different publicly available libraries, the most popular of which are ENDF, JEFF, and JENDL. The Scarabée source repository contains a pre-generated script to produce a library for ENDF/B-VIII.0. You are certainly able to generate a library using a different evaluation should you desire. If you do this, please consider contributing your script to the Scarabée project ! Download the ENDF files of your choice and store them in a place where they can be accessed by the processing script later on.

In addition to having already installed Scarabée, you also need to install the Python packages ENDFtk and PapillonNDL. Both must be compiled from source.

To process the ENDF files, the FRENDY nuclear data processing code is used. You should build the program and make sure that the executable is available in your path.

Warning

When you use the makefile provided by FRENDY, it will produce an executable called frendy.exe, but the scripts with Scarabée assume that it is simply called frendy, without any extension ! Therefore, you should be sure to rename the executable after it has been compiled.

In the data folder of the source repository repository, you will find the example script to generate a library from ENDF/B-VIII.0 files. You should use this script as a base, and modify it to your needs. If you are going to make an ENDF/B-VIII.0 library, you should only need to modify the first few lines in the block at the top of the file (i.e. the location of the ENDF files, desired temperatures, desired group structure, etc.). After this is complete, you can run the python script from within the data directory, and it should begin to process your data library.

Warning

Generating a nuclear data library is extremely computationally intensive. Depending on the number of nuclides and the number of temperatures, it could take a dedicated PC up to 1 week to complete processing.

Tip

If for some reason, the script dies in the middle of processing, you do not need to restart from scratch once you have fixed the problem ! You can simply comment out the library information lines and the nuclides which were processed sucessfully, then re-start the script.

After the script has completed, you should have a new HDF5 formated file which contains the entire nuclear data library and depletion chain.

Using a Library#

Once you have a nuclear data library file, you should move it to a safe location where you aren’t likely to accidentally delete it ! It took a long time to generate, so it would be a shame to lose it !

When running an assembly calculation with Scarabée, you can optionally provide the path to the library you want to use:

from scarabee import NDLibrary

ndl = NDLibrary("/path/to/endf8_shem281.h5")

This is a convenient method to be able to quickly change libraries. However, you might have a favorite library/group structure which you want to use all the time. For such a case, you can set the SCARABEE_ND_LIBRARY environment variable on your machine to be the path to your prefered library. If this variable is set, Scarabée will use that library when loading an NDL.

from scarabee import NDLibrary

# Loading NDL from the SCARABEE_ND_LIBRARY environment variable path
ndl = NDLibrary()
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