v0.3.0

[tamaranorman]

Upcoming API Changes: The next major release of TORAX will include significant API updates including: changes to the config structure/nesting, improved output naming and structure and improved module loading. This release (v0.3.0) provides a stable version with significant changes from v0.2.0 for users to pick up improvements with a stable API.

TORAX improvements since v0.2.0 (highlights)

• Changes to interacting with TORAX programatically

  • Moved the config to Pydantic improving validation and readability
  • Replaced sim.Sim with torax.run_simulation which takes a torax.ToraxConfig

• Physics features

  • Average charge state equilibria added
  • QLKNN_7_11 transport model
  • qualikiz transport model
  • Improved simple models for pedestal boundary condition
  • Can split main ion and impurity into mixtures of ion species. DT ratio now impacts fusion power. Radiation for each separate impurity can be calculated
  • Improved radiation models including Mavrin polynomial fits to ADAS data
  • Cyclotron radiation
  • New Vloop boundary condition option for current diffusion equation

• **Miscellaneous and bugfixes

  • Fixes for q_face and s_face being stale
  • Fix in He3 tail temperature calculation
  • P_LH_minimum bugfix
  • Extra post-processed outputs added
  • Improved on-axis treatment of pprime and plasma current
  • Minor performance optimizations (~5% in compilation time and runtime)
  • Refactors: various restructuring and cleanups

New Contributors

• @hassec made their first contribution in fix: restrict typeguard version <3, to ensure jaxtyping compatibility #599
• @anteplu made their first contribution in Plot global plasma parameters vs time #617
• @emmanuel-ferdman made their first contribution in Update Geometry source #740
• @shreyans413 made their first contribution in Set Bohm-GyroBohm multiples for default Bohm and GyroBohm terms #773
• @harshtech123 made their first contribution in Added dW/dt term to P_sol in post_processing  #827
• @demoncoder-crypto made their first contribution in Add validator to prevent bremsstrahlung and Mavrin models from being … #869

Full Changelog: v0.2.0...v0.3.0

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This discussion was created from the release v0.3.0.

[theo-brown]

This is a super exciting release, thanks everyone for your hard work! Excited to test it out.
Just to confirm, the Pydantic changes only add validation, right? So there's no change to how the user writes a config?

[jcitrin]

Thanks for the kind words!

The Pydantic changes are mostly invisible to the user, apart from how config validation errors look. The user-facing config dict is as before, and pydantic builds the ToraxConfig class (which is a pydantic object) based on that same dict.

Under the hood it's been a massive change, making the development experience much better. It improves validation, removes the builder concept, simplifies how interpolations of input data onto the TORAX grid are done and cached, can be used to annotate input variables for how JAX jit treats them (e.g .static arguments or not), and more.

[jcitrin]

The whole concept of "Provider" is now gone too

[theo-brown]

Awesome! Definitely sounds like the 'right' way to do it, and I can see both from your comments and the commit history that it has been a pretty massive body of work. Looking forward to learning how to interact with the changes as a developer, I've done a bit of Pydantic before with web stuff so I'm interested to see what more it can do!

[jcitrin]

More detailed questions on pydantic may be better answered by @sbodenstein who spearheaded the effort