CompareGlobal

CompareGlobal Tool

If you are making changes to NairnMPM (or OSParticulas), an important development process is that the changes to not change other calculations options. One way to check for problems is

1. Run a simulation with original code writing various interesting results to a global results file.

The CompareGlobal tool will compare two global results files and calculate various metrics for differences between the two results. It is useful for evaluating new features.

The main visualization tools (NairnFEAMPM and NairnFEAMPMViz) have many visualization options, but may not have what you need. For 3D visualization, the options are more limited and NairnFEAMPMViz has very few options for visualizing 3D results. The purpose of the ExtractMPM tool is to read NairnMPM binary archive files, extract selected results, and write them to text, binary or XML files. These new files can serve as input to alternative visualization tools or alternative software for interpreting the data.

Compiling CompareGlobal

The first step is to compile the CompareGlobal command-line tool. On MacOS X or Windows, you can compile CompareGlobal using its target in the XCode or Visual Studio projects found in the nairn-mpm-fea/Common/Projects folder. On any other system (or alternatively in MacOS X), you can compile by changing directory to the nairn-mpm-fea/NairnMPM/tools directory and use the command

make CompareGlobal SYSTEM=(system)

where (system) defines the system being used. This option mainly picks path to the c++ compiler on your computer. For unsupported systems, you can manually set the path to that compiler using

make ExtractMPM CC=/usr/local/gcc48/bin/g++

Other options that can be passed to the make command are

• CFLAGS - options passed to compiler (default: -c -O3)
• LFLAGS - options during linking step (default: none)

Other make functions are:

make
make clean
make install

A make by itself will compile all tools (and not just CompareGlobal). The clean option will delete compiled objects and executables for all tools. The install option will copy all compiled tool executables to an install folder. The default install location is ~/bin but that can be changing by adding ioutput=(new folder) to the make command.

Using CompareGlobal MPM

You run the ExtractMPM command line tool on a command line with

CompareGlobal [-h?] -o originalpath newpath ...

ExtractMPM reads the NairnMPM binary archive files in archive0, archive1, etc., extracts the data selected by the options, and outputs it all to standard output or to file(s) specified in the options.The flags and their descriptions, group by subject, are: