  A key aspect in the modelling of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibria in
tokamak devices is having access to fast, accurate, and stable numerical
simulation methods. There is an increasing demand for reliable methods that can
be used to develop traditional or machine learning-based shape control feedback
systems, optimise scenario designs, and integrate with other plasma edge or
transport modelling codes. To handle such applications, these codes need to be
flexible and, more importantly, they need to have been validated against both
analytically known and real-world tokamak equilibria to ensure they are
consistent and credible. In this paper, we are interested in solving the static
forward Grad-Shafranov (GS) problem for free-boundary MHD equilibria. Our focus
is on the validation of the static forward solver in the Python-based
equilibrium code FreeGSNKE by solving equilibria from magnetics-only EFIT++
reconstructions of MAST-U shots. In addition, we also validate FreeGSNKE
against equilibria simulated using the well-established MATLAB-based
equilibrium code Fiesta. To do this, we develop a computational pipeline that
allows one to load the same (a)symmetric MAST-U machine description into each
solver, specify the required inputs (active/passive conductor currents, plasma
profiles and coefficients, etc.) from EFIT++, and solve the GS equation for all
available time slices across a shot. For a number of different MAST-U shots, we
demonstrate that both FreeGSNKE and Fiesta can successfully reproduce various
poloidal flux quantities and shape targets (e.g. midplane radii, magnetic axes,
separatrices, X-points, and strikepoints) in agreement with EFIT++ calculations
to a very high degree of accuracy. We also provide public access to the
code/data required to load the MAST-U machine description in FreeGSNKE/Fiesta
and reproduce the equilibria in the shots shown.
