SiMon -- Simulation Monitor

SiMon is an automatic monitor/scheduler/pipeline for astrophysical N-body simulations. In astrophysics, it is common that a grid of simulations is needed to explore a parameter space. SiMon facilitates the paramater-space study simulations in the follow ways:

• Generate a real-time overview of the current simulation status
• Automatically restart the simulation if the code crashes
• Invoke the data processing script (e.g. create plots) once the simulation is finish
• Notify the user (e.g. by email) once the simulations are finished
• Report to the user if a certain simulation cannot be restarted (e.g. code keeps crashing/stalling for some reasons)
• Parallelize the launching of multiple simulations according to the configured computational resources
• Detect and kill stalled simulations (simulations that utilize 100% CPU/GPU but do not make any progress for a long period of time)

SiMon is highly modular. Arbitrary numerical codes can be supported by SiMon by overriding module_common.py (python programming needed) or editing config files (no programming needed).

SiMon is originally built for carrying out large ensembles of astrophysical N-body simulations. However, it has now been generalized to carrying out any computational intensive numerical jobs (e.g., scheduling an observational data reduction pipeline).

Installation

To install the latest stable version of SiMon, you can do

pip install astrosimon

Or you can install the latest developer version from the git repository using:

pip install https://github.com/maxwelltsai/SiMon/archive/master.zip

Usage - Start with an example code

SiMon is simple to use! To display an overview of all managed jobs, you simply type the following in your terminal:

simon

If you would just like to see the currently running jobs, following command will help, the same scheme also applies to check other status such as NEW, DONE, STOP:

simon | grep RUN

If it is your first time running SiMon, it will offer to generate a default config file and some demo simulations on the current directly. Just proceed according to the interactive instructions. Then, your simulations can be launched and monitored automatically with

simon start

This will start SiMon as a daemon program, which schedule and monitor all simulations automatically without human supervision. The daemon can be stopped with

simon stop

The interactive dashboard of SiMon can be launched at any time (before, during, and after the simulations) with this simple command:

simon -i

Or if you prefer: simon i or simon interactive.

Usage - Apply to your code

Edit the global config file SiMon.conf using your favorite text editor, change default

Root_dir: examples/demo_simulations

to be the dir of where your code located, then start simon again!

That's it! Go and take a beer :)

Paper

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017PASP..129i4503Q