[MITgcm-support] Best practice for cubed-sphere grid generation?

[Jason Goodman]

MITGCM folks:

What's the current best practice for generating new cubed-sphere geometry files?  My student and I are attempting to to model global circulation in the oceans of icy worlds like Jupiter's moon Europa.  The map is simple (a waterworld), but the planetary radius needs to be changed, and the grid spacing needs to be fine-tuned to our hardware.

My student and I are trying different approaches.  He's been trying to use the cubed sphere grid generator at http://mitgcm.org/viewvc/MITgcm/MITgcm_contrib/high_res_cube/  -- this package is cluttered and poorly documented (can't complain, it's a contrib) and we're having trouble understanding the workflow to produce new grid files.

I've been trying to use the SPGrid tool ( http://mitgcm.org/public/r2_manual/latest/online_documents/node281.html ) -- this tool does not appear to have been updated in 6 years.  Some of the libraries it depends on are out of date, and are incompatible with modern operating systems.  (Specifically, it depends explicitly on WildMagic v3; current version is v5, and WildMagic v3 won't build on my Ubuntu 11 box.)

What should we be using?