Simulations provide invaluable insights to plan (before) and understand (after) experiments at neutron and X-ray facilities. A wide set of libraries and programs is already available to simulate neutron and X-ray beams, propagate them through the beamlines, interact with the sample and get data acquired by detectors.

The aim of libpyvinyl is to provide a high level neutron and X-ray simulation API. With this harmonized user interface we achieve seamless interoperability of individual simulations thereby facilitating the concatenation of simulation steps into a simulation pipeline. The vast differences with respect to parameter names, unit conventions, configuration syntax, i.e. the user interface, is, hence, overcome creating a libpyvinyl compliant API for each simulation software.