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
Serial Computation
for details about serial computation. See the
User Guide:Running in Parallel From Composer
for 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 thanesPtclInCell
, 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.
- -gpudevnum
Select the GPU to use to run a serial 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.
- -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.
- --license
Show license info.
- -iargs
Pass options (including substitutions) to internal txpp. For example:
vorpalser -i esPtclInCell.pre -iargs NDIM=2, DX=0.1