The Pencil Code is primarily designed to deal with weakly compressible turbulent flows, which is why we use high-order first and second derivatives. To achieve good parallelization, we use explicit (as opposed to compact) finite differences. Typical scientific targets include driven MHD turbulence in a periodic box, convection in a slab with non-periodic upper and lower boundaries, a convective star embedded in a fully nonperiodic box, accretion disc turbulence in the shearing sheet approximation, self-gravity, non-local radiation transfer, dust particle evolution with feedback on the gas, etc. A range of artificial viscosity and diffusion schemes can be invoked to deal with supersonic flows. For direct simulations regular viscosity and diffusion is being used.

The code is written in well-commented Fortran90.

For a more detailed description and a full introduction see the manual.pdf file (see under links on the left).

Remember to sign up for the Pencil Code User Meeting (see link on the left)!

Please note, we recommend that you use SVN to obtain and update the Pencil-Code. Make sure that SVN is up to date.

If you just want to check out the latest version of the code use:

svn checkout http://pencil-code.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pencil-code

If you have a Pencil-Code username NAME at google-code than use:

svn checkout https://pencil-code.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pencil-code --username NAME

This will also allow you to submit changes to the code.

As a committer, you are strongly encouraged to sign up on the pencil-code-commits mailing list (link on the left), because others may make changes to stuff that you just coded, and it is in your interest that you should know about this, and it is in our interest that you are not ignorant.

If you want to become a member of any of the groups without being a committer, and if your name is not already known to us (or by googling) we would appreciate a brief email to us explaining your interest. This is to prevent spammers entering our lists. The pencil-code-core list, on the other hand, is reserved for project owners only.