36. Serial FLASH Output Comparison Utility (sfocu)

Sfocu (Serial Flash Output Comparison Utility) is mainly used as part of an automated testing suite called flashTest and was introduced in FLASH version 2.0 as a replacement for focu.

Sfocu is a serial utility which examines two FLASH checkpoint files and decides whether or not they are “equal” to ensure that any changes made to FLASH do not adversely affect subsequent simulation output. By “equal”, we mean that

• The leaf-block structure matches - each leaf block must have the same position and size in both datasets.

• The data arrays in the leaf blocks (dens, pres...) are identical.

• The number of particles are the same, and all floating point particle attributes are identical.

Thus, sfocu ignores information such as the particular numbering of the blocks and particles, the timestamp, the build information, and so on.

Sfocu can read HDF5 and PnetCDF FLASH checkpoint files. Although sfocu is a serial program, it is able to do comparisons on the output of large parallel simulations. Sfocu has been used on irix, linux, AIX and OSF1.