What’s in a name?

cFAC was started around 2010 as a fork of Flexible Atomic Code (FAC), written by Ming Feng Gu at the Space Science Laboratory of Berkeley.

The initial focus was on providing large volumes of data as required, e.g., for collisional-radiative plasma modeling, and eliminating reliance upon third-party Fortran numerical libraries with their C equivalents (hence the change in the package name).

Licensing

FAC, and hence cFAC, are released under the GPL (version 3 or higher) license.

However, some bits of FAC which are still used in cFAC, were published in Computer Physics Communications, and as such, are licensed for non-profit or academic use only.

In order to compile in these CPC-licensed modules, you need to pass the “--with-cpc-modules” configure flag and explicitly agree to the CPC licensing terms. Please note that as a result, the “sfac” executable will not be redistributable.

Installation

Prerequisites

• C and FORTRAN compilers (such as gcc and gfortran).

• The GNU Scientific Library (GSL), version 1.15 or above.

• The SQLite software library.

  • If you install these software using a package manager of your OS, make sure you select the development packages (*-dev*). For example, under a Debian(-based) Linux, do

    sudo apt install gcc gfortran libgsl0-dev libsqlite3-dev
    

• In addition, if compiling a snapshot from GitHub (strongly not recommended for “production” calculations!), GNU Automake, help2man, and a fairly complete LaTeX installation will be required.

Compilation

1. Get the latest release from https://github.com/fnevgeny/cfac/releases. The filename should be like cfac-1.7.0.tar.gz. Unpack it and change to the newly created directory.

2. ./configure

   • Specify --prefix=my/dir, if the default /usr/local is not what you want.

   • Use the “--with-extrainc” and “--with-extralib” options if the third-party libraries are not installed in the default system places.

   • Run ./configure --help for more options.

   • Note in particular the “--with-cpc-modules” option (see above).

3. make

4. make check

   • This will run a test suite of demo scripts and compare their output against “reference” results. Please report any failure.

5. make install

   • This installs the “sfac” executable and manual, as well as the CFACDB library, C header file, and utility.

Usage

The “sfac” executable accepts an input file as its only argument. See the “demo” directory for examples. For more details, please read the manual, and make sure to read the FAQ section of it.

Evgeny Stambulchik
Faculty of Physics
Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot 7610001
Israel