Run control and queuing

FLAC
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1

Just curious how people generally do run control or queuing when conducting multiple analysis runs for evaluation of sensitivity/uncertainty, or dynamic inputs, etc. Our most common situation is earthquake analysis where we are running the same model for many input ground motions. We typically produce a static save file that we then load up and analyze with a simple command-line queuing process. We call a dynamic run-file (or set of files) that will complete each analysis in series. We set up several of these to run in parallel in order to speed up the process to the extent we can. We are nearly always running this process from the command-line instead of the gui.

A few problems I’ve noticed with this are:

  1. The program sometimes won’t respond to an escape command to halt during the solve loop. In this case you have to issue a break (ctrl+c) which causes the licensing to temporarily become unavailable. It seems to resolve itself in a few minutes but is a bit of an issue if you realize you need to reorder the queue or view plots during a run, etc.

  2. There seems to be a limit on save name character length (including directory name), so if you set up a queue of analyses and realize partway through that the save names are getting cut off, they could potentially overwrite each other.

  3. It can be challenging to keep track of what has been completed if you don’t have a log file of some sort.

Are there any plans to develop a separate queuing or run control module? Perhaps something that can put commands into a stack that can be manipulated either in the gui or on the command line? Any best practices by others for analysis control using fish?

2
  1. If you use ‘loop’ to control the run, especially when ‘whilestepping’ statement is used in the fish code, the ESC command may be ignored by the code, in this case you may need to hold the ESC key to force FLAC to terminate the run.
  2. Yes, there is a limit on the name length. In FLAC8.0/8.1, the limit was increased from 80 to 200. In the case when the name length(including the directory name) exceeds the limit, you may use ‘set cd name xxx’ command to change the current working directory to the folder where the *.sav file is stored, and then use ‘set cd back’ command to change the directory back to the working folder… So in this way, you don’t need to provide a full path for the save command, and can have a *.sav file name length up to 200…
  3. We don’t have a plan to develop this in the current version, but there may be a better solution in our next release, you can send your request to Flac2dsupport@itascacg.com
3

Thanks, the set cd approach is something I had not run across yet and I think would solve the issue for most situations. Holding escape doesn’t seem to always work though. I guess it just seems like there could be a better way to do run control with a stack/heap structure or a solve control module. I’ll follow up with FLAC2dsupport.