Setting up startdifx
*This guide assumes difx and all of it’s dependencies have already been installed for information on how to install difx please start here
startdifx is a simplified method of launching mpifxcorr. It requires a few additional steps to set up beyond the normal DiFX installation. This list will outline the additional setup required to get startdifx running on an individual machine like a personal laptop.
1. Create script runmpifxcorr.[$DIFX_VERSION] and place it in your $PATH. As an example if the value of $DIFX_VERSION = trunk the name of the script will be
runmpifxcorr.trunk
The script will set up the difx environment and run mpifxcorr. Heres an example of runmpifxcorr.$[DIFX_VERSION]. The path to the setup file will be different for every system:
#!/bin/bash source /home/mike/DIFX-DEVEL/difx/setup/setup.bash mpifxcorr $@
This script is required by startdifx
2. The other script that needs to be set up is genmachines as startdifx can automatically run this to generate the machines and threads files needed by mpifxcorr for correlation. genmachines requires the environment variable $DIFX_MACHINES to be set. $DIFX_MACHINES points to a file which describes the local setup. Here is an example file which describes a VM on a laptop with 6 cores and “ubuntu” as the host name:
version = 1 ubuntu, 2, 6
The 2 makes ubuntu the head node. Assuming the file is named local_setup the value of $DIFX_MACHINES should be set like this
export DIFX_MACHINES = /full/path/to/local_setup
3. After the initial setup step startdifx should be ready to run on a difx input file simply type:
startdifx input_file.input
