Working on an HPC

While HPCs won’t let you install packages globally, you can still use aurel. You just need to create a virtual environment and install aurel there.

Create a virtual environment

Create a virtual environment and activate it.

python -m venv ~/myenv
source ~/myenv/bin/activate

Then you should be able to do:

pip install aurel

and install any other packages you may use.

Jupyter notebook

If you want to use aurel in a jupyter notebook, add your virtual environment as a Jupyter kernel

python -m ipykernel install --user --name=myenv --display-name "Python (myenv)"

Now you can load your jupyter notebook, select the kernel you just created Python (myenv) and type in your notebook:

import aurel

Python script

If you want to use aurel in a python script, before running it, activate the environment

source ~/myenv/bin/activate
python myscript.py

then in your python script you can have

import aurel

Convergence

See Schwarzschild_check notebook

Choose the order of the finite difference scheme you want to use, this is done by setting the fd_order parameter in the FiniteDifference class. Options are: 4 (default), 6, 8. fd = aurel.FiniteDifference(param, fd_order=6)
Increase the grid resolution in your simulation, or reduce the grid spacing for generated data.

Citation

If you use aurel in your work, please cite it as:

@misc{aurel2025,
  title     = {Aurel: A Python package for automatic relativistic calculations},
  author    = {Munoz, Robyn L.},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://github.com/robynlm/aurel}}

This code is not published yet, so to add to citation count please also include:

@article{R.L.Munoz_M.Bruni_2023,
  title     = {EBWeyl: a Code to Invariantly Characterize Numerical Spacetimes},
  author    = {Munoz, Robyn L. and Bruni, Marco},
  journal   = {Classical and Quantum Gravity},
  volume    = {40},
  number    = {13},
  pages     = {135010},
  year      = {2023},
  month     = {jun},
  doi       = {10.1088/1361-6382/acd6cf},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  eprint    = {2211.08133},
  primaryClass = {gr-qc}}