Design and Development of User-Friendly Interface Environment for Accelerating Scientific Research Process: A Case Study for Nuclear Fusion Applications

The integration of modern computational tools with legacy scientific applications is an ongoing process to preserve the efforts of scientists put in developing such applications while enhancing and extending their functionalities. This paper introduces the design and development of interface environment using a modern Python programming language for accelerating the standard operating procedure for scientific legacy codes developed mostly based on FORTRAN language. A methodology has been proposed which accelerates the scientific research process followed in nuclear fusion community applications. For the validation of the proposed methodology, a standalone graphical interface viz. ANISolve for 1-D Radiation Transport Code ANISN has been developed by coupling of the source code with its pre and post-processing tasks. ANISolve accelerates the setup and evaluation procedure followed in radiation transport calculations and provides a user-friendly environment for the experienced as well as novice users. Apart from legacy applications, the developed interface environment have also been used for ACTYS, a recently developed activation analysis code, to develop a user-friendly standalone interface viz. UI-ACTYS. UI-ACTYS helps in setting up the problem for performing the activation calculations and can be further enhanced for output visualization.