Direct Support for Manual Creation of Input files

Most simulation software can be controlled with (a set of) configuration files. These files are typically text files, i.e. they can be edited manually. LLMs can support this process.

Challenges

Conventional tools are mainly used for syntax checks, i.e. they know very little about the semantics. That works for typical programming languages that have a rather small set of keywords and their use does not strongly depend on the context. This is very different from configuration files, where syntax checks (e.g. in the case of a YAML format) does not add a lot of value.

Support for binary formats would be difficult.

Plain LLM’s are not particularly good at math, i.e. they will be less suited to respect contraints such as “the norm of the four numbers making up a unit quaternion should be 1.0”.

Technical Aspects

Language Server Protocol, more information on langserver.org.

Tree-sitter

LSP Implementations

Use Cases

DAMASK

DAMASK supports multiple solvers, all of them have custom definitions of geometry and load case but share a common configuration for material and numerics.

LAMMPS

LAMMPS is configured with a single confiuration file.

Conclusions