Vorpal Command Line Options

When running Vorpal from the command line, the input filename and runtime options are specified as command line options. To use multiple options, the command line syntax is:

vopalser|vorpal -i filename [-o prefix_name] [-dim num] [-dt fnum] [-rnum] [-sd] [-nd] [-nc] [-oc] [other options]

in which vorpalser is used to run a serial computation or vorpal for parallel. See the “Serial Computation” section in the User Guide manual for more details about serial computation. See the “Running in Parallel from Composer” section in the User Guide manual for more details of command line invocation with parallel computation.

Commonly used options that you can specify on the command line include:

-i filename

Read input from file named filename.

For example:

vorpalser -i esPtclInCell.pre

-o prefix_name

Base names of output files on the text string prefix_name.

For example, if you want output files named newesPtclInCell rather than esPtclInCell, use:

vorpalser -i esPtclInCell.pre -o newesPtclInCell

-dim num

Run simulation using num spatial dimensions. This option overrides the dimension parameter specified in the input file.

For example, if you want to run esPtclInCell in 2D rather than 3D, use:

vorpalser -i esPtclInCell.pre -dim 2

-dt fnum

Use time step of size fnum. This option overrides the dt parameter defined in the .pre file.

For example, if you want to run esPtclInCell with the timestep duration 9.9e-12 seconds, use:

vorpalser -i esPtclInCell.pre -dt 9.9e-12

-n num

Run the simulation for num time steps. This option overrides the nsteps parameter.

For example, if you want to run esPtclInCell with 50 time steps rather than 10, use:

vorpalser -i esPtclInCell.pre -dt -n 50

-d num

Dump data every num time steps. This option overrides the dumpPeriodicity parameter.

For example, to run esPtclInCell and dump output after every 5 time steps, use:

vorpalser -i esPtclInCell.pre -d 5

-r num

Restart Vorpal from dump num.

For example, if you want to restart esPtclInCellSteps using the output dumped at time step 50, use:

vorpalser -i esPtclInCellSteps.pre -r 50

-sd: Dump data at start of simulation. This option is useful for debugging purposes. It lets you see whether Vorpal used the data you wanted it to use at the start of the simulation.

-nd: Disable data dumping.

-nc: Redirect all of the *_comms_*.txt output to /dev/null.

-oc [rank]: Suppress the creation of all comms text files except for that file from the specified [rank] process. This flag is overriden by the -nc flag, above.

-b: Provide a barrier at each timestep. This means that, when running in parallel at the end of a time step, the simulation will halt all processes that are more rapid than others so that the slower processes can catch up before the next timestep initiates.

-id: Forces each processor to dump into its own separate file, these files can then be concatenated into a single file for analysis.

-ns: Disable particle sorting. Sorting affects the way particles in cells and memory are handled and can lead to some inefficiencies both with sorting on or off. It is up to the user to discover whether or not to turn the sorting off. However, there are some algorithms, especially in the plasma discharge realm, in which sorting is needed.

-gpu #,#: Select the GPU indices from the node to use for the run.

-ra: Read all particles from all domains on a restart. Particularly useful if you try to restart with a different number of cores or configuration of domains to the dataset from which the earlier data is taken.

-h/--help: Show a help message with all of the vorpal command line inputs.

-v, --version: Show Vorpal version. This provides information relevant to developers if you run into issues.

-validate: Validate input file semantics.

-svn, --svn: Show svn revision number of this build.

-blockHelp: Display help for block, or use ‘Simulation’ for top-level information.

--license-path: Specify by full path the license file to use.

-a/--accept: Accecpt the End User License Agreement.

-iargs: Pass options (including substitutions) to internal txpp. For example:

vorpalser -i esPtclInCell.pre -iargs NDIM=2, DX=0.1