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FmiGo

FmiGo is a backend for the Functional Mockup Interface (FMI) standard. It connects multiple Functional Mockup Units (FMUs) over ZeroMQ or MPI in a master-server architecture. There is support for stepping both Model Exchange and Co-Simulation FMUs. The latter can be connected with typical weak coupling or using an algebraic constraint solver based on Claude Lacoursière's SPOOK solver.

Note that support for this project is very limited until we receive further funding.

What follows are some brief build and test instructions (GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac), followed by a section on how to set up GitLab CI, followed by examples. There is also some stuff from the old README, which we haven't turned into tickets yet.

Building and test requirements

Pre-requisites

CMake is meta build system required for creating the build system on all platforms. We support versions down to 2.8.12.2 in GitLab CI, but recommend version 3.5.1 or later.

We recommend using Ninja for building on platforms where it is available, since it is much faster than msbuild and make (at least when using CMake generated Makefiles).

Python 2.7 or 3.x is required for running the tests. You will also need to install some Python packages specified in requirements.txt using pip and/or pip3:

pip install -r Buildstuff/requirements.txt
pip3 install -r Buildstuff/requirements.txt

Finally, bash is also required for running tests. Any version released in the last ten or so years should work fine. bash 4.3.11 and 4.3.48 are confirmed working via GitLab CI. win-bash 0.8.5 is confirmed to not work however, due to the lack of subprocesses. More information about Windows specifics will be given in the Windows section.

GNU/Linux

Ubuntu and Arch are our primary development platforms, and thus are the most supported. Ubuntu derivatives such as Lubuntu are also supported. Debian testing is also likely to work.

After getting the required packages installed, you build as you would any other CMake project. For example, using Ninja:

mkdir -p build && cd build && cmake -G Ninja .. && ninja install

Ubuntu / Debian

Inspect the relevant Dockerfile in Buildstuff/ to find the list of required packages and potential distribution quirks that need attention.

Arch

Ask Claude ;)

Tools required for testing on GNU/Linux

Make sure bash and coreutils are installed. This should be the case on any GNU-ish system.

Windows

There are two major paths to building on Windows: Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 and msys2.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2015

Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 and MS-MPI. For MS-MPI you should download and install both msmpisdk.msi and MSMpiSetup.exe.

If you have everything set up correctly then the following commands should work in cmd.exe: cmake, msbuild, mpiexec. If not then you need to point %PATH% to where these programs are located.

Finally, run the appropriate .bat file for 32-bit or 64-bit builds:

  • build_msvc14.bat for a 32-bit build
  • build_msvc14_win64.bat for a 64-bit build (can't be tested currently)

The build will take quite a bit of time due to having to build all dependencies. This may change if Windows ever gets a package manager. NuGet shows some promise in this direction, but has not been experimented with so far.

Note that tests only work for the 32-bit build due to the lack of a working 64-bit GNU GSL build, which is required for building our test FMUs.

msys2

msys2 is a GNU-like system for Windows. Once set up, it may be easier to keep working than the Visual Studio approach. It is not yet covered by CI however.

Since msys2 uses pacman, see Arch above for instruction. GNU GSL may require special attention. You may also need MS-MPI as with the Visual Studio build.

Tools required for testing on Windows

You will need bash and some basic tools like dd, seq and bc. These ship with msys2, so it's a good idea to always install it, even if you're doing a Visual Studio build. These tools also ship with win-bash, however win-bash itself is much too old so care must be taken that msys2's bash is used instead in that case.

Once properly set up, just run bash run_tests_msvc14.sh to run tests on the 32-bit build. As mentioned before, 64-bit tests do not yet work.

Mac

You have two options: HomeBrew or MacPorts.

HomeBrew

brew install protobuf \
             hdf5 \
             jsoncpp \
             mpich \
             zeromq \
             gsl \
             homebrew/science/suite-sparse

MacPorts

  • Does not look for umfpack, needs to be globally available sudo port install SuiteSparse
  • Does not look for json, requires jsoncpp library sudo port install jsoncpp
  • Requires mpicc sudo port select --set mpi mpich-mp-fortran sudo port install mpich

GitLab CI

To set up this project with GitLab CI, docker and gitlab-runner are needed. In general, follow the instructions in GitLab for help with how to add a new runner. Perhaps the simplest way is to issue the command

gitlab-runner register

then follow the instruction given on screen.

You can give the CI a test run locally by calling ci.sh. This is a good idea to do prior to pushing anything into GitLab.

Each build will create three images which will use about 1 GiB of disk space each. Since they can be recreated from .gitlab-ci.yml and the Dockerfiles, it is recommended to purge these build images from docker periodically to save disk space. This can be done with a cron job that runs once per week or once per month.

On a suitably permissioned user create a script docker-cleanup.sh in ~/:

docker ps --filter "status=exited" --no-trunc -aq       | \
    xargs --no-run-if-empty docker rm
docker images --no-trunc | grep umit | awk '{print $3}' | \
    xargs --no-run-if-empty docker rmi -f

Then use crontab -e to add a crontab entry for that user:

# Clean docker images on Sunday nights
0   0  *   *   0     /home/<username>/docker-cleanup.sh

The downside to this is that the first GitLab CI run on the following week will take a couple of minutes longer than usual, due to the need to re-do apt-get updates and installs. If this is too often then scheduling once per month may be nicer:

# Clean docker images at midnight on the first day of every month
0   0  1   *   *     /home/<username>/docker-cleanup.sh

Examples / how to make use of the programs

There are multiple ways of making use of the tools in this repository.

ssp-launcher.py

System Structure and Parameterization of Components for Virtual System Design (SSP) is a way to parametrize, connect and bundle multiple FMUs in self-contained units called SSPs. This project includes a script called ssp-launcher.py under tools/ssp, which can be used to launch SSPs. We have also extended the standard to support kinematic shaft constraints and to being able to supply the fmigo master with extra command-line options. See FmiGo.xsd for more details on these extensions.

The directory also includes some example SSPs to look at, and the CMake build scripts for them. The build scripts further depend on the example FMUs which we use for testing, so it might also be good to take a look at those (tests/umit-fmus/kinematictruck and tests/umit-fmus/gsl).

It is possible to use ssp-launcher.py in either ZeroMQ or MPI mode. MPI is used by default. The -p option is used to switch to TCP aka ZeroMQ mode, and can be given zero or more explicit ports to use.

pygo

pygo is a set of Python scripts which can be used to abstract and simplify connecting and running FMUs together. The abstraction is also useful when one has multiple FMUs that all implement the same model, but with different names for inputs and outputs (as is often the case in larger institutions). In this way it is quite similar to SSP, but instead of writing XML you write Python.

Raw fmigo / scripts

To interact with fmigo directly, reading the manual is highly recommended. See doc/fmigo.pdf or invoke man fmigo after installing. Many of the scripts under tests/ make use of this method of calling fmigo, but it is not necessarily the easiest way to do so.

The short story on using fmigo directly is that each FMU gets an index starting at zero, based on its position in the master's command line. The master is either given some filenames to FMUs if using MPI (fmigo-mpi) or URLs to FMU servers if using ZeroMQ (fmigo-master and fmigo-server). Compare these two:

$ mpiexec -n 3 fmigo-mpi fmu0.fmu fmu1.fmu

versus:

$ fmigo-server -p 1234 fmu0.fmu & \
  fmigo-server -p 1235 fmu1.fmu & \
  fmigo-master tcp://localhost:1234 tcp://localhost:1235

In both cases fmu0.fmu gets index 0 and fmu1.fmu gets index 1. Note the -n 3 in the arguments to mpiexec. The MPI world needs to be one larger than the number of FMUs involved, since node zero is the master and nodes 1..N are the FMUs.

Connections are made between FMUs based on their indices, which can be two or more, plus a number of arguments that depends on the type of connection being made. See the manual for the exact syntax involved.

Old README

Here is the contents of the old README:

Things to do:

  • cleanup, code review (Tomas, Jonas, Claude)

  • check performance on high performance switches, clusters, etc. Abisko for TCP/IP and MPI (Tomas, when there's free time)

  • Master stepper

    • support for NEPCE from Benedikt
    • Support for TLM
    • extrapolation + interpolation
    • iterative methods
    • multirate
    • model based extrapolation model reduction and identification (Benedikt) inside FMU ModelExchange wrapper
    • Grand mix of model exchange and co-sim: master stepper takes change of several ME FMUs as well as cosim ones, and time-integrates the ME FMUs together with a sensible integrator. (See Ziegler and Vangheluwe for theory)
    • define kinematic couplings in SSP

  • Simulation master

    • weather report
    • database to store and communicate data

  • publication plan

    • Edo's filter
    • large comparisons of different weak masters
    • kinematic coupling
    • theory of linear stability