Working with PyClaw’s built-in examples

PyClaw comes with many example problem scripts that can be accessed from the module clawpack.pyclaw.examples. If you have downloaded the PyClaw source, you can find them in the directory clawpack/pyclaw/examples/. These examples demonstrate the kinds of things that can be done with PyClaw and are a great way to learn how to use PyClaw.

Running and plotting examples

Interactively in IPython

A built-in example can be run and plotted as follows:

from clawpack.pyclaw import examples
claw = examples.shock_bubble_interaction.setup()
claw.run()
claw.plot()

To run and plot a different example, simply replace shock_bubble_interaction with another example name. A number of keyword arguments may be passed to the setup function; see its docstring for details. These usually include the following:

• use_petsc: set to 1 to run in parallel
• solver_type: set to classic or sharpclaw
• iplot: set to 1 to automatically launch interactive plotting after running. Note that this shouldn’t be used in parallel, as every process will try to plot.
• htmlplot: set to 1 to automatically create HTML plot pages after running.
• outdir: the name of the subdirectory in which to put output files. Defaults to ./_output.

From the command line

If you have downloaded the Clawpack source, you can run the examples from the command line. Simply do the following at the command prompt:

$ cd clawpack/pyclaw/examples/acoustics_1d_homogeneous
$ python acoustics.py iplot=1

You can run any of the examples similarly by going to the appropriate directory and executing the Python script. For convenience, the scripts are set up to pass any command-line options as arguments to the setup function.

Built-in examples

You can see results from many of the examples in the galleries.

Adding new examples

If you have used PyClaw, we’d love to add your application to the built-in scripts. Please contact us on the claw-users Google group or just issue a pull request on Github.