Simulation Factory Advanced Tutorial

The Simulation Factory is an effective method for controlling all facets of a Cactus simulation. It provides a central facility for managing an authoritative source tree, controlling and providing remote access to many commonly-used HPC machines including LONI and the TeraGrid, builds and compiles a Cactus source tree into many independent configurations, and can also manage a simulation all the way from creation to output.

Getting Started

In order to begin using The Simulation Factory, it must be checked out from svn. The Simulation Factory typically resides in the simfactory folder inside a Cactus source tree. This can be accomplished with the following svn command:

svn co https://svn.cct.lsu.edu/repos/numrel/simfactory/branches/PYSIM_2010 simfactory

The Simulation Factory can also be placed in an independent location to be used with multiple Cactus source trees. This approach will be detailed later.

Initial Setup

Once The Simulation Factory has been checked out from svn, the next step is to create two required configuration files. Assuming The Simulation Factory has been checked out into the simfactory folder, this initial configuration can be accomplished with the following commands:

cp simfactory/etc/defs.ini.example simfactory/etc/defs.ini
cp simfactory/etc/defs.local.ini.simple simfactory/etc/defs.local.ini

Edit simfactory/etc/defs.local.ini and replace

• YOUR_LOGIN with your usual username
• YOUR@EMAIL.ADDRESS with your usual email address
• YOUR_ALLOCATION with your usual allocation

Additional Configuration

The Simulation Factory contains a database known as the Machine Database. This collection of information is used to define and help mitigate the uniqueness of each individual HPC machine. The Machine Database is an authoritative collection of information, and is generally not meant to be edited by a user. To add, or change properties of a Machine Database entry, simfactory/etc/defs.local.ini is used. For instance, if an alternative username, allocation, and sourcebasedir is needed for the machine queenbee, you would add the following section:

[queenbee]
user          = queenbee_username
allocation    = queenbee_allocation
sourcebasedir = /work/@USER@

To get a list of preconfigured machines, issue the following command:

simfactory/sim list-machines