Files

Table of contents

Input / Output

Input Archive (input_archive.tar.gz)

Input archive stores the files uploaded to Rescale and included in the a given job. These include

  • ds.dat MAPDL input file
  • cloudconnect CloudConnect job runner
  • Any required Pre-Stress Environment files
  • Any user included files

Result Archive (result_archive.tar.gz)

Result archive contains all required results files collected from the calculation node. This is the reason some files can seem like they are missing the job files after a run with CloudConnect. Some files, like solve.out, are included in the result archive, but can also be viewed in the job files. Using compression on the result files reduces the combined file size by more than 30%.

Result archive contains

  • file.rst / file.rth result file
  • file.db simulation database
  • parm.xml project info
  • ansys.exitcode solver process exit code

and conditionally generated files

  • file.gst convergence data
  • file.nrNNN Newton-Raphson files
  • file.cnd contact tracker data
  • file.ce remote point “spiders”
  • file.mode combined mode shape file
  • file.mcom mode combination file
  • Future analysis files
  • User created files

Any files compressed into the result archive are listed in the Rescale process logs (process_output.log file in job results).

Manually Extracting Archives

CloudConnect will automatically create and extract all the archives, but it is possible to manually extract the archives.

7-Zip

7-Zip is an free and open source file archiving program, which can be used to extract tar.gz archives. Since tar.gz uses a two-step process of first combining all files into a single tar archive and then compressing the archive with gzip, we first need to undo the compression, which will create a .tar file. The result files can the be extracted from the .tar file.

Extraction example with result archive

TAR.exe

BSD TAR.exe was added to all Windows machines since Windows 10 (1803) build 17063. To extract files using TAR, open the Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe) and navigate to the directory with the tar.gz archive. For example the result_archive.tar.gz can be extracted to the same directory as the archive with

tar -xzvf result_archive.tar.gz

or you can specify an existing target directory with the -C flag

tar -xzvf result_archive -C results

TAR.exe is what CloudConnect uses internally to create and extract the archives and if it’s missing, it is a good idea to install it.