pybind: expose the unpreconditioned internal-basis gradient#7
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krystophny wants to merge 8 commits into
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pybind: expose the unpreconditioned internal-basis gradient#7krystophny wants to merge 8 commits into
krystophny wants to merge 8 commits into
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Add a precondition flag to VmecModel.evaluate (default true, unchanged behaviour). With precondition=false the forward model returns at the INVARIANT_RESIDUALS checkpoint, so get_forces() yields the raw, unpreconditioned force: the gradient of VMEC's augmented functional (MHD energy plus the spectral-condensation and lambda constraints) with respect to the decomposed internal-basis state. This is the consistent state/gradient pair an external optimizer needs to minimise in VMEC's own basis. The native solver's preconditioned search direction (precondition=true) is a different vector; the raw gradient is the equilibrium residual and vanishes at convergence. Tests: raw force is finite and differs in direction from the preconditioned force, and drops by >1e6 from the initial guess to the converged equilibrium.
This was referenced Jun 14, 2026
Satisfies the docformatter pre-commit hook (was failing CI).
The 'Compare benchmark result' step uses github-action-benchmark with comment-on-alert and the GITHUB_TOKEN, which is read-only for pull requests from forks -> 'Resource not accessible by integration'. Gate that step on the PR coming from the same repo so fork PRs still run the benchmarks but skip the write-back instead of failing.
The pinned vmec-0.0.6 cp310 wheel was f90wrapped against numpy 1.x. Under the numpy 2.x that the test env now resolves, importing it dies in the f90wrap array interface (f90wrap_vmec_input__array__rbc: 0-th dimension must be fixed to 2 but got 4), so test_ensure_vmec2000_input_from_vmecpp_input could never actually run on CI (and is currently red on main too, where the wheel's runtime libs are not even installed). Build VMEC2000 from upstream source with current f90wrap, which produces numpy-2-compatible bindings. The recipe mirrors SIMSOPT's own CI (hiddenSymmetries/VMEC2000, cmake/machines/ubuntu.json). An explicit 'import vmec' check in the install step surfaces any remaining problem here rather than as a confusing test failure.
With VMEC2000 built from current upstream source, the compatibility test runs for the first time and hits vmecpp indata fields that have no counterpart in the legacy VMEC2000 INDATA namelist (e.g. free_boundary_method), which raised AttributeError. The test explicitly checks only the common subset, so guard the lookup with hasattr and skip fields VMEC2000 does not have, instead of enumerating them one by one.
…mit pin Bring this stack branch up to the corrected CI baseline (from proximafusion#583/proximafusion#564): - tests.yaml: build VMEC2000 from the pinned source commit and cache the wheel; drop the unused FFTW/HDF5 dev packages. - benchmarks.yaml: skip the result upload on fork PRs (read-only token). - test_simsopt_compat.py: skip vmecpp-only INDATA fields. - CMakeLists: pin abseil to the 20260107.1 commit hash for Clang >= 21.
…hmark fork guard (proximafusion#564) * build: bump CMake abseil pin to 20260107.1 for Clang >= 21 The CMake FetchContent abseil pin (2024-08) fails to compile under Clang >= 21: absl::Nonnull SFINAE in absl/strings/ascii.cc and the numbers.cc nullability annotations are rejected by the newer frontend. Bump to the 20260107.1 LTS, which compiles cleanly under Clang 21.1.8 and GCC. Clang is the compiler required for the Enzyme autodiff build. The Bazel build keeps its own (BCR) abseil pin and is unaffected. * ci: skip benchmark result upload on fork PRs (token is read-only) The 'Compare benchmark result' step uses github-action-benchmark with comment-on-alert and the GITHUB_TOKEN, which is read-only for pull requests from forks -> 'Resource not accessible by integration'. Gate that step on the PR coming from the same repo so fork PRs still run the benchmarks but skip the write-back instead of failing. * ci: build VMEC2000 from source so the compat test runs on numpy 2 The pinned vmec-0.0.6 cp310 wheel was f90wrapped against numpy 1.x. Under the numpy 2.x that the test env now resolves, importing it dies in the f90wrap array interface (f90wrap_vmec_input__array__rbc: 0-th dimension must be fixed to 2 but got 4), so test_ensure_vmec2000_input_from_vmecpp_input could never actually run on CI (and is currently red on main too, where the wheel's runtime libs are not even installed). Build VMEC2000 from upstream source with current f90wrap, which produces numpy-2-compatible bindings. The recipe mirrors SIMSOPT's own CI (hiddenSymmetries/VMEC2000, cmake/machines/ubuntu.json). An explicit 'import vmec' check in the install step surfaces any remaining problem here rather than as a confusing test failure. * test: skip vmecpp-only indata fields in the VMEC2000 compat subset With VMEC2000 built from current upstream source, the compatibility test runs for the first time and hits vmecpp indata fields that have no counterpart in the legacy VMEC2000 INDATA namelist (e.g. free_boundary_method), which raised AttributeError. The test explicitly checks only the common subset, so guard the lookup with hasattr and skip fields VMEC2000 does not have, instead of enumerating them one by one. * build: pin abseil to the 20260107.1 commit hash Pin the FetchContent abseil dependency to commit 255c84d (the exact commit behind the 20260107.1 LTS tag) instead of the tag itself, so a moved tag cannot change the dependency under us. * ci: cache and pin the VMEC2000-from-source build Use the canonical recipe (cache the built wheel keyed on the pinned source commit 728af8b, drop the unused FFTW/HDF5 dev packages) instead of rebuilding VMEC2000 unpinned on every run.
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What
Add a
preconditionflag toVmecModel.evaluate(defaulttrue, so existingbehaviour is unchanged). With
precondition=falsethe forward model returns atthe existing
INVARIANT_RESIDUALScheckpoint, soget_forces()returns the raw,unpreconditioned force.
Why
This is the first step toward driving VMEC++ with gradient- and Hessian-based
optimizers (inside the solver and as a differentiable component of an external
stellarator optimizer). Such optimizers need a consistent (state, gradient) pair.
VMEC minimizes an augmented functional: the MHD energy plus the Hirshman
spectral-condensation constraint and the lambda (magnetic-coordinate) constraint.
Its "force" is the gradient of that augmented functional with respect to the
decomposed, internal-basis state, where the
scalxcscaling makes the state andforce conjugate. The raw force at the
INVARIANT_RESIDUALScheckpoint is exactlythat gradient.
The native solver instead exposes the preconditioned search direction
(
precondition=true), which is a different vector: the preconditioner is anon-trivial metric, not a scalar. An external optimizer minimizing in VMEC's
basis needs the raw gradient, plus VMEC's preconditioner applied separately as
the metric (a later patch).
No core solver code changes; only the pybind layer selects the checkpoint.
Verification
evaluate(1, 2)is the documented cold-start case (forces initialised to 1.0);the raw-gradient path uses
iter1 >= 2, where the force is well defined.Empirically, on
examples/data/solovev.json(ns=11), the raw force is theequilibrium residual: it vanishes once the native solver converges, and it is
not the preconditioned direction.
New tests (
tests/test_internal_gradient.py):