This user’s guide is intended to help new users become proficient at using ScatPy to manage their work with DDSCAT. It assumes you have a working copy of DDSCAT and some understanding of how it works.
DDSCAT is an implementation of the discrete dipole approximation by Bruce T. Draine and Piotr J. Flatau. The DDSCAT homepage is at: * <http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~draine/DDSCAT.html>_
The latest version of the source code is available at: * https://code.google.com/p/ddscat/
The authors have kindly provided a precompiled binary for Windows users. For other operating systems you will have to compile from source.
The indispensable DDSCAT user guide can be downloaded from: * https://ddscat.googlecode.com/files/ddscat7.3.0_UserGuide_130529.pdf
The general workflow for ScatPy is to:
When ScatPy is imported for the first time it will attempt to create a folder .ScatPy in the current user’s home directory. It will populate this folder with configuration files that can be edited to suit your requirements. The two most important ones are default.par which is the base DDSCAT.par file for all DDSCAT jobs, and default.py which contains the default configurations for file locations, and file system types. These files can be edited to match your preferred configuration.
Multiple profile files mean that it is possible to setup and test a job on one computer (e.g. a local workstation) and then export the job settings for execution on a different system (e.g. a remote cluster).