9.2 Seal (Siesta Extension and Application Language)

To outline the capabilities of SIESTA, we give short summaries of some of the most important concepts of its extension language. Some examples of its use are given in order to show what the building blocks of more complex experiments look like.

The main abstraction are functions and macros for parallelizing the evaluation of functions, which is required in order to evaluate the objective function in parallel on different computers. A persistent object storage was implemented in order to save data between executions of SIESTA and for later examination. After describing how to set up experiments and call simulation tools, the support for inverse modeling problems is explained. Licenses of commercial simulation tools can be managed by SIESTA, which is useful since the number of available licenses is often limited. Finally we describe how substitutions in textual input files for simulators are performed.