SPPARKS is designed to be a Monte Carlo (MC) kernel for performing kinetic MC or Metropolis MC computations. Additional pre- and post-processing steps are often necessary to setup and analyze a simulation. This section describes additional tools that may be useful.
Users can extend SPPARKS by writing diagnostic classes that perform desired analysis or computations. See this section for more info.
Stitch is the primary mechanism for IO in spparks, at least for potts related models for grain growth and additive manufacturing simulations. A python script in tools/stitch/plot_stitch_cut.py demonstrates how to read and plot perpendicular cuts/images from a spparks simulation. Sphinx documentation for stitch can be built using the doc sources in lib/stitch/docs.
External tools like ovito can also be used to visualize outputs -- especially text outputs such as dump files.
The output from potts/quaternion can also be visualized with crystalline orientation analysis tools like orix or mtex.
Another external toolkit called Pizza.py can be used to setup, analyze, plot, and visualize data for SPPARKS simulations. Pizza.py is written in "Python" and is available for download from the Pizza.py WWW site.
Addtional scripts below are distributed with spparks under the tools directory.