Synth FORC

Synth-FORC is a simple yet powerful tool that can generate forward models of synthetic first order reversal curves (FORC) using micromagnetic models.

Installation

Web service

You can install the synth-forc back-end web service using setup.py in the usual way. For example, from the directory containing setup.py

`$> pip install .

This should pull the required dependencies for the back end along with installing synth-forc itself. Once this is done, the service runs using gunicorn - a small script called start-web-service gives an example of how to get the web service started. However its probably best to put this behind a http server such as apache or nginx.

In order to run the back end, you will need a database of raw first order reversal curve (FORC) data. This is stored in a SQLite file (available here) via Zenodo. If you make use of this data set in your projects/publications we ask you to cite DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7625521. This data was generated using the micromagnetic software package MERRILL.

Finally to run the back end, you will need to create an environment variable called SYNTH_FORC_WEB_CONFIG which points to a configuration file. The contents of this file should look like this

image-directory: <path to images dir>
sqlite-file: <path to>/synth-forc-data.db
logging:
  file: <path to>/your-log-file.log
  level: debug
  log-to-stdout: false

• image-directory is a directory that will store FORC images and loops - this is used for caching and if the back end cannot find an image corresponding with the user's input, it will generate a new one in here, and then serve that image.
• sqlite-file is the full path to the SQLite data file (available here).
• logging is optional, however it may be useful for debugging, additional options include:
  • file is the location of a file to push logging information to;
  • level is the debug level, which should be one of (in decreasing verbosity) debug, info, warning, error or critical;
  • log-to-stdout is a flat to indicate if logging information should also go to stdout (this should probably always be false).

Front end

Once the web service is running, the front end needs to be deployed. These are the files in the html directory. Once deployed the file index.js in the html/src directory should be edited to update the location of the back end service. This is located in the backend_service_url function and it just needs to return wherever the back end lives.

Notes for developers

When up-versioning the code you will need to change the version in the following files before tagging

• lib/synth_forc/__init__.py
• setup.py