FFEA runner

The FFEA runner is the program that will compute a FFEA trajectory given an initial system under a set of conditions, as described in the FFEA Input File. The program is compiled in two flavours: ffea and ffea_mb and is meant to run from the command line typing:

 ffea <myInputFile.ffea>

Both ffea and ffea_mb are parallel programs using OpenMP. The former, ffea uses all the threads within every blob, while the later, ffea_mb assigns one (or more) blobs to every thread. Ideally, ffea is to be used in systems where there is a single enormous blob (in terms of number of nodes), while ffea_mb performs much better in a system with many blobs.

A number of optional arguments are available:

'-h/--help' - Prints out a help text to the command prompt
'-v/--verbose' - Prints out to the command line a user defined level of information
'-d/--no-detail' - Only writes measurement data to files for the total global system, not each individual blob and pair of blobs (the .fdm file is not produced)
'-m/--mode' - Select the mode of FFEA you would like to run: Full simulation [default] (0), Linear Elastic Model (1), Linear Dynamic Model (2) or Timestep Calculator (3). 

FFEA can run in parallel using multiple threads through OpenMP. By default, it will try to use as many threads as cores found. One can control the number this behaviour adjusting the environment variable OMP_NUM_THREADS.

The following pages describe the gory details to run FFEA simulations: