The Clawpack Community of Codes

Clawpack, the Conservation Laws Package, has long been one of the standards for solving hyperbolic conservation laws but over the years has extended well beyond this role. Today a community of open-source codes have been developed that address a multitude of different needs including non-conservative balance laws, high-order accurate methods, and parallelism while remaining extensible and easy to use, largely by the judicious use of Python and the original Fortran codes that it wraps.

This talk will present some of the recent developments in projects under the Clawpack umbrella, notably the GeoClaw and PyClaw projects. GeoClaw was originally developed as a tool for simulating tsunamis using adaptive mesh refinement but has since encompassed a large number of other geophysically relevant flows including storm surge and debris-flows. PyClaw originated as a Python version of the original Clawpack algorithms but has since been both a testing ground for new algorithmic advances in the Clawpack framework but also an easily extensible framework for solving hyperbolic balance laws. Some of these extensions include the addition of WENO high-order methods, massively parallel capabilities, and adaptive mesh refinement technologies, made possible largely by the flexibility of the Python language and community libraries such as NumPy and PETSc. Because of the tight integration with Python tecnologies, both packages have benefited also from the focus on reproducibility in the Python community, notably IPython notebooks.