Outputs

Output formats

Astra uses several types of outputs you may want for your setup. By default, Astra allows for 4 kinds of outputs:

  • logs which essentially tell the user what Astra is currently doing. When running in serial, logs are sent to stdout, but when MPI is enabled, only the logs of the rank 0 process are sent to stdout, and each process (including rank 0) simultaneously writes a log file astra.n.log where n is the process MPI rank.

  • dump files (.dmp) which are Astra specific binary files containing all of the data at machine precision to restart your run. These files are therefore the ones which are read when Astra is restarted.

  • VTK files (.vtk) are Visualization Toolkit files, which are easily readable by visualization software such as ParaView or VisIt. A set of Python methods is also provided to read VTK files from your Python scripts in the pytools directory.

  • timevar files are text files in CSV format that allow you to trace box-averaged quantities as a function of time. A list of possible timevar diagnostics is given in Output section.

  • Python scripts, defined in the input file Python section. This launches a user-defined Python function fed with Astra data. One can then directly plot or interact with Astra outputs from Python.

The output periodicity and the user-defined variables should all be declared in the input file, as described in Output section.