Example ARMI Application

This is a simple example application using the Advanced Reactor Modeling Interface (ARMI). It is intended to serve as a jumping-off point for new ARMI users and developers. Currently, it only employs a single external plugin, TerraPower's open-source Dragon Plugin, which provides a rudimentary interface to the Dragon lattice physics code. However, as new ARMI plugins are made available to the public, this project may grow to encompass them as well.

Getting Started

As with other parts of the ARMI ecosystem, this project requires Python; specifically Python 3.7 or greater. With Python installed, the Example ARMI App can be installed in a couple of ways. The simplest is to install it straight from this GitHub repository with:

> python -m pip install git+https://github.com/terrapower/armi-example-app

This will cause pip to also install all of the dependencies of ARMI, the Dragon ARMI plugin, and their dependencies in turn. You may notice that the armi and dragon-armi-plugin packages are themselves coming from GitHub repositories. This is because, for a number of reasons, they cannot be hosted as wheels on the standard Python Package Index.

Now that you have the ARMI components installed, you will also need to get set up with Dragon. See the links above for some guidance on that. You will also need to grab a data library to be able to run Dragon.

With Dragon set up properly, you should now be ready to run cases with the example application. This is probably not going to be super earth-shattering, though, since all it can do right now is produce cross sections.

Chances are, you are looking at this repository because you wish to make an ARMI application of your own, or to experiment with adding a new ARMI plugin to an existing application. If that's the case, you probably want to clone the whole repository so that you can make modifications and see the documentation. Do that now:

> git clone https://github.com/terrapower/armi-example-app
> cd armi-example-app

There is a simple example case in doc/examples/ANL-AFCI-177/, which is explained in more detail here. You should be able to change directories into doc/examples/ANL-AFCI-177/, and run the case with:

> python -m armiexample run anl-afci-177.yaml

This fires up the built-in run ARMI entry point, which creates a Standard Operator and runs through a single cycle, calculating cross sections using the Dragon Plugin. After a whole bunch of output, you should see a handful of ISOTXS files that were generated from the Dragon interface. If you see those, then you know it worked.