Running Tests

Basic Smoke Test

After a build and install it’s recommended to perform a quick smoke test with Spheral to see if the Spheral environment was installed and all of the libraries were built and linked together correctly.

From your install directory run:

./spheral -c "import Spheral"

This will run the Spheral Python process and try importing the Spheral modules. If successful you should see a banner printed with information about the version of Spheral, after which Python exits.

ATS Testing Suite

Spheral uses ATS (the Python Automated Testing System) to execute a suite of parallel tests. During install a script is generated spheral-atstest which handles calling the ats script in /usr/gapps/Spheral/bin and passing the generated spheral executor script to it.

From the install directory run:

./spheral-atstest tests/integration.ats

ATS Filters and Options

Appropriate filters are injected into the spheral-atstest script based on build configurations. However if you are using ats directly or wish to override some of these filters you can pass them as defined below.

Non MPI Filter

If Spheral was built without MPI support we will need to pass a filter to our ats command to prevent parallel tests from being performed:

--filter='"np<2"'

This stops the ATS suite from attempting to run any tests that rely on more than one process/rank.

Debug Build Filter

If Spheral was built in Debug mode it is recommended to pass the below filter if you value your time.

--filter='"level<100"'

These filters stack when invoked. So if you are running the test suite on a non-mpi debug build the command would be:

./spheral-atstest tests/integration.ats --filter='"np<2"' --filter='"level<100"'

CUDA Filter

When building Spheral with CUDA support and without MPI support on Blue-OS systems we need to pass –smpi_off to ATS. When using spheral-atstest this flag is injected for you. However, for veboseness the flag is:

--addOp "--smpi_off"

Note

We need to pass --addOp as a way to forward the -smpi_off option to ATS. This is because spheral-atstest uses an intermediate layer to control ATS execution.

If you are using ATS directly you only need to pass:

--smpi_off