To run the standard 2D examples, go to the folder programs/standard_2d:

cd programs/standard_2d

To be sure that the simulation code is compiled, you can compile it with:

make

An executable streamer should be present. You can run it with a configuration file like this:

./streamer streamer_2d.cfg

This example writes its output to a subdirectory output. If this directory does not exist, the code will abort with a message

Output name: output/streamer_2d_...
ERROR STOP Directory not writable (does it exist?)

After creating the output directory with mkdir output, the code should run and print (among other things) the following information:

af_write_silo: written output/streamer_2d_000001.silo
af_write_silo: written output/streamer_2d_000002.silo
af_write_silo: written output/streamer_2d_000003.silo
...

These Silo files can be visualized using for example Visit, as explained at Saving output and visualization. An example is included below.

2D Pseudocolor plot of electric field

The 2D version of the streamer executable can also be used for axisymmetric simulations:

./streamer streamer_cyl.cfg

There are also 1D and 3D examples, which can be found in

programs/standard_1d
programs/standard_3d (note that this example takes a long time!)

Controlling the number of threads

The code uses OpenMP parallelism. If the default gfortran compiler was used, the number of threads can be controlled by specifying OMP_NUM_THREADS, for example with:

OMP_NUM_THREADS=1 ./streamer <config file>

or with

export OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
./streamer <config file>

For 2D simulations, it might not be beneficial to use more than say 4 threads. For 3D simulations, 16 or 32 is the recommended upper limit, if your system has that many physical cores.