ET Workshop 2015

Einstein Toolkit Workshop 2015

This workshop will take place on August 11-14, 2015 in Stockholm. Links:

• Workshop website

Einstein Toolkit for VirtualBox

Snapshot of the ETK OS

For the Einstein Toolkit tutorial, we have prepared a VirtualBox disk with a Debian Linux-based ETK-OS, which contains all the necessary ingredients to start using Einstein Toolkit: the Cactus code, Carpet parallel adaptive mesh refinement driver for the Cactus, SimFactory for managing simulations, gnuplot, ygraph and VisIt for 1D and 3D visualizations.

The virtual machine can be downloaded at the following links:

• ETK-2015.vdi.zip (5 GB --> 14 GB when inflated)
• ETK-2015.vdi.zip.md5 (MD5 checksum for the zip archive)

If your computer has AFS client installed, you might find it more convenient to copy the archive from AFS partition:

/afs/astro.su.se/service/www/compact-merger.astro.su.se/ETK2015/ETK-2015.vdi.zip 
/afs/astro.su.se/service/www/compact-merger.astro.su.se/ETK2015/ETK-2015.vdi.zip.md5

Configuring VirtualBox (Linux version)

VirtualBox settings

If you want to test Einstein Toolkit in virtual environment, follow these steps.

1. Download and install Oracle VirtualBox on your laptop.
2. Run it: Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager appears. Select "New" to create a new virtual machine.
3. Select Type: Linux, Version: Debian (32-bit)
4. Select generous amount of RAM for your virtual machine (>1GB)
5. Pick an option Use an existing virtual hard drive and point it to the unzipped file: ETK-2015.vdi. Press OK to create the VM.
6. Select Settings > Display and allocate at least 32MB for your virtual display.
7. Select Settings > Processor and click the checkbox to enable PAE/NX.
8. If your laptop has more than one core which you would like to use in virtual machine also, but it's greyed out, you might need to enable hardware virtualization support (e.g. VT-x for Intel processors) in your BIOS.
9. Start your VM; use etk for both the username and the password inside your virtual machine.

Running a test simulation

On the virtual machine, ETK comes preconfigured with the default configuration sim (for a brief introduction into Cactus framework and terminology, see Tutorial for New Users). Precompiled executable is:

 ./Cactus/exe/cactus_sim 

You could start a test simulation either directly,

 mkdir ~/simulations/test
 cd ~/Cactus
 cp exe/cactus_sim par/static_tov.par ~/simulations/test
 cd ~/simulations/test
 ./cactus_sim static_tov.par

or using SimFactory:

 cd ~/Cactus
 simfactory/bin/sim submit test --parfile=par/static_tov.par

These test simulations create and evolve a static relativistic TOV star in full GR, in an octant with 5 levels of refinement. Current VM already contains a test simulation, located at:

 cd ~/simulations/static-tov/output-0000

Please refer to the Tutorial for New Users for more details about configuring, compiling, running Cactus, and using SimFactory to simplify these tasks. In SimFactory, the machine configuration file for the ETK OS is simfactory/mdb/machines/etk.etk.ini, the optionlist is etk.cfg and the runscript is generic.run. If you succeeded with virtualizing multiple cores in your VM, you could try the generic-mpi.run runscript for running on multiple cores and/or with multiple OpenMP threads.