Support for Production Runs

The ``Run Manager'' is a set of user functionality provided by the run_manager directories in the opus_core and opus_core.services packages provide support for specifying, starting, re-starting, and processing ``production`` runs. Such a system is necessary to deal with the long run times for such a model system, and the large amount of data each run produces. A 30-year simulation of the Puget Sound Regional Council's (PSRC) dataset with their EMME/2 travel model, for instance, takes about 5 days to complete and creates about 14 GB of cache data. These numbers are for a computer with dual 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon^TM processors and 4 GB of RAM running Windows XP Professional. The PSCS dataset contains about 800,000 gridcells, 1.3 million households, and 1.8 million jobs in the initial year. Each UrbanSim year takes about 1.5 hours to simulate, and each travel model run, done every 5 years, takes around 12 hours to simulate.

Here are some of the things Run Manager helps us do:

• Define a run configuration, including what models to run, what years to run, etc.
• Start a production run.
• Monitor the status of all production runs.
• Re-start a production run when something goes wrong.
• Compute indicators on the results of a production run, including runs that are still simulating.
• Inspecting specific dataset values from any year of the simulation, as when diagnosing problems.
• Manage consistency regarding the availability and status of production runs.