Make DESC outputs compatible #233
Description
Currently, parastell relies on pystell to extract LCFS coordinates from VMEC equilibria stored in NetCDF format. Extending parastell to also support DESC outputs saved in HDF5 would likely not require significant effort. DESC can be used in a similar way to pystell by loading the equilibrium and computing the LCFS coordinates directly.
As a workaround, one can load a DESC equilibrium in Python and use DESC’s built-in methods to export it as a NetCDF file compatible with pystell/parastell. However, this approach is somewhat cumbersome, especially in my case, where I have thousands of DESC-compatible equilibria that would need conversion to the VMEC format.
I’m not sure whether this feature is worth implementing, as it would introduce an additional dependency in parastell. That said, DESC is becoming increasingly common in stellarator optimization workflows, and I suspect I’ll eventually add DESC support to my parastell fork. I was wondering if this functionality might be of interest to others.