Diagnostics

Spheral uses Caliper to preform diagnostics, such as timing. To enable this functionality in the code, Spheral needs to be configured with ENABLE_TIMER=On. Otherwise the diagnostic regions are no-ops for improved preformance.

./scripts/devtools/host-config-build.py <sys_type>-<spec>.cmake -DENABLE_TIMER=On

Querying using Caliper

By defualt, even when configured with ENABLE_TIMER=On, there is no information being recorded. Caliper uses command line options to report data, the simplest of which is CALI_CONFIG=runtime-report which reports the timing for the regions and prints them out in the terminal. For example:

CALI_CONFIG=runtime-report python Noh-cylindrical-2d.py

Note

To obtain a similar result to that of the removed Spheral::Timer use CALI_CONFIG=runtime-report(output=time.txt),calc.inclusive,region.count this will result in a file named time.txt with cumulative times for the nested regions as well as a count of how many times each region ran.

There are many different options that can be used with CALI_CONFIG to view various information. Here are some extra links for those who want to read or experiment with other features in Caliper that can be incorperated into Spheral in the future:

Configuration basics

Builtin Configuration

Manual Configuration

Output Format

Adding Regions

So far there are two different types of regions in Spheral, using the following macros:

TIME_FUNCTION
TIME_BEGIN("timer_name")
TIME_END("timer_name")

TIME_FUNCTION can be added to the very beginning of a function and creates a region for the entire function using the function’s name. TIME_FUNCTION uses just the function name and no class or parameter information, so be careful when using this method with functions that could share names.
TIME_BEGIN("timer_name") and TIME_END("timer_name") create a region between the two different calls and use the string (in this case timer_name) as the name.