Running the Graple Program

Running Simulations using Graple

Running a simulation using HT-Condor, IPOP, and Python is a reasonably straight forward endeavor.

Prerequisites:

1. An x86 PC running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.
2. IPOP VPN
3. HT-Condor
4. Python 2.7
5. GRAPLE Program

Sim – a single instance or run of a simulation.
Job – one or more simulations archived together and executed serially as a single batch job.

Simulation format and layout

You will need to layout your files a directory in the following manner. Under the simulation top level folder, “SimRoot”, create the following directories: Condor, GLM, Graple, Scripts, Sims. These directories will contain the following files:
Condor – the Condor scripts used to schedule the jobs
GLM – the GLM executable and libraries for running the simulations
Graple – the job batching program which optimizes workload and simplifies usage
Scripts – One or more R scripts used for post-processing the GLM output
Sims – contains sub-directories of simulation folders. Each one is a self-contained simulation to be run and should be named Simxxx (where xxx is a monotonic increasing numerical suffix).

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Workflow

There are 3 phases of Graple’s workflow – Simulation Preparation, Execution, and Results Collation.

###Simulation Preparation This is the default mode for Graple when invoked without any parameters. A series of ZIP archives are created and each one represents a batch job that is scheduled with Condor. Each archive contains the GLM, Scripts, and one or more Sims/Simxxx folders. On the Condor execute node it will be unpacked and each simulation executed.

###Simulation Execution This is automatically invoked on the execute node. For each simulation Graple will run GLM and place its output in a Results sub-directory. It will then invoke the top level R script with the Results directory path. The output of R should be placed in the same folder. Upon completion of all the simulaltions, Graple will archive the all the outputs that were run in the job. The Results archive will then be transferred to the host that initiated the job.

Results Collation

Invoking Graple with the fixup option on the client system will cause it to unpack the archives for all the jobs that have been completed. The results are copied into their respective Simxxx/results directory.

##Usage

1. Open a command prompt and change directory to the Graple sub folder under the simulation root folder.
2. Invoke Graple without any paramters
3. Check Condor status
4. When jobs are completed, run Graple -fixup