Running Kassiopeia

After installation, and assuming the proper environmental variables have been set by running the script kasperenv.sh, Kassiopeia can be run directly from the command prompt. The script sets the environment variables accordingly so that the variable KASPERSYS points to the installation directory, and Kassiopeia can be found in the standard executable path. To run a Kassiopeia simulation, the usage is simply:

Kassiopeia <path-to-xml-config-file>

Kassiopeia also includes advanced variable replacement functionality, which makes it easy to modify one or many *simulation parameters on-the-fly. This can be done with the following usage:

Kassiopeia <path-to-xml-config-file> -r <variable1>=<value1> <variable2>=<value2>

In this case, all elements after the -r flag are considered variable definitions. Alternatively, the following syntax can be used. Here all variable names are prefixed with --, and options can be freely mixed:

Kassiopeia <path-to-xml-config-file> --<variable1>=<value1> --<variable2>=<value2>

Verbosity levels

As a quick means to change the output verbosity (i.e. the amount of messages shown on the terminal while the program is running), the -v and -q flags can be used. Each option raises/lowers the verbosity level, so that the following example would raise the level by one unit. Try it with one of the example XML files below!

Kassiopeia <path-to-xml-config-file> -v -q -v

Output files

Upon completion of a simulation, the ROOT output files may be found in the directory <kassiopeia-install-path>/output/Kassiopeia (where <kassiopeia-install-path> usually can be replaced by $KASPERSYS.) These output files can then be processed or analyzed by an external program, such as root. If VTK was enabled at build time and the corresponding writer was enabled in the XML file, a set of .vtp output files (polygon data in the VTK file format) is created in the same directory.

In order to prematurely terminate a running simulation, Kassiopeia provides a user interrupt feature. To terminate the simulation while allowing Kassiopeia to clean up and save the accumulated data to file, the user may type Crtl-C just once in the terminal. To immediately exit the simulation (without cleaning up or saving data), the user may press the key combination Crtl-C again, which leads to program termination.