MOOSE Support in ICE

Introduction

The Multi-physics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) is parallel, finite-element framework developed at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). To learn more about it, check out mooseframework.org. ICE has always provided strong support for MOOSE input generation, simulation execution, and data visualization as a core part of the platform. As of the summer of 2015, that support has been greatly updated to incorporate comments from the MOOSE internal development team and MOOSE application developers. The updated support provides a unified interface for interacting with the MOOSE framework, and tools for the embedded visualizations of problem meshes, simulation output meshes, and Postprocessor CSV plotting. Additionally, we have improved our MOOSE tooling to incorporate real-time updating from a running MOOSE simulation back to ICE. Users can now specify a list of Postprocessor values they care about, launch their simulation, and see, in real-time, those Postprocessor plots updating.

This article will detail these new updates, and walk you through the use of the new MOOSE support in ICE. It will detail ICE installation, MOOSE input generation, existing MOOSE input file loading, simulation launch, and post-simulation data visualization. Additionally, ICE now supports MOOSE application development. To see a tutorial on that, check out Developing MOOSE Applications with ICE.

ICE Installation

The ICE team has developed a new and improved mechanism for users to install ICE and its dependencies. To do so, users need to simply navigate to https://sourceforge.net/projects/niceproject/files and download the new ICE_installer.sh script. To install ICE, simply run this script in a directory of your choosing. For example:

mkdir ICE_install
cd ICE_install
wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/niceproject/files/ICE_installer.sh .
chmod +x ICE_installer.sh
./ICE_installer.sh

Running this script will pull down the correct ICE, VisIt, and HDFJava for your operating system, unpack them, and configure ICE to use the downloaded VisIt and HDFJava dependencies. For Mac users, this script will additionally configure ICE to use the current user's environment variables and register those environments with ICE through the Apple Application Launch Service. All of this will enable you to simple double click the created ICE application icon (/Users/username/Applications/ICE.app for Mac, and for Linux, an ICE application icon in the Programming category of the applications menu).

For Windows users, we also provide MSI installers at the same files download URL. Just download the installer specific to your architecture, run it, and you'll be ready to use ICE.

Prerequisites

To use the MOOSE support in ICE, you'll need to have MOOSE installed on your system, and any MOOSE-based application you would like to use (could just be moose_test if you don't have any other application). To install MOOSE on your system, check out mooseframework.org/getting-started. If you would like to install MOOSE and create a MOOSE-based application of your own (or clone an existing application) from with ICE itself, check out the Developing MOOSE Applications with ICE article.