TRANSIMS: Applications and Development Workshop
April 8–9, 2010
Advanced TRANSIMS User Interfaces - TRANSIMS Studio and the RTE Run Time Environment
Hubert Ley
Transportation Research and Analysis Computing Center
Argonne National Laboratory
List of Authors
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Hubert Ley
Transportation Research and Analysis Computing Center
Argonne National Laboratory
277 International Drive
West Chicago, IL 60185
Abstract
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TRACC has been tasked by USDOT to advance the use of TRANSIMS by providing computing resources and expertise to the US transportation modeling research community. Based on experience gained with running TRANSIMS over the past years, as well as based on frequent feedback from the TRANSIMS user community using the TRACC cluster, TRACC has been developing tools that will make TRANSIMS more suitable for large scale deployment. This includes the development of network editors, visualization tools, and now a new TRANSIMS development environment that makes the use of TRANSIMS significantly easier while still providing an extremely flexible platform suitable for a research project with unknown potential extensions. The concept is based on two major components:
1.) a run time environment, consisting of a Python module, that de facto enables the user to write procedural control files that run under the control of a library that checks on the dependencies of all TRANSIMS modules and coordinates many of the tedious tasks such as keeping track of input and output files. The library provides features such as run-when-necessary (like make under Linux), simplifies partitioning dramatically on multi-core and multi-node environments, is entirely cross-platform so that scripts need no modifications to run under Linux or Windows, and interacts tightly with the other component, the visual interface
2.) the graphical user interface pulls together all components for editing and manipulating TRANSIMS data and control files. It is a fully graphical application with built-in editors, allow running jobs internally with immediate access to results, errors, warnings, and output files, and has an extensive help system built in that consists of all current documentation plus an internal representation of keys and control files available to the IDE. All documentation is automatically cross-referenced to allow for quick access to relevant information.
The TRANSIMS Studio application is available for free under the same license as TRANSIMS itself. It has been released on SourceForge and is available for testing and early alpha deployment.
Biography
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Hubert Ley is the team leader for transportation research at TRACC and has worked with TRANSIMS for about 3 years. His background is in the development of scientific research tools and applications, such as advanced user interfaces and web-based communication technology. He worked for 15 years as a nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, mostly on modeling and simulation of nuclear fuels and severe reactor accidents. He was also the principal investigator assigned to building the computing and networking infrastructure for the International Nuclear Safety Centers across the former Soviet Union, and for establishing the Asian Nuclear Safety Network communication infrastructure in many countries across Asia, a project where Dr. Ley served as a technical consultant to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the US Department of Energy. Dr. Ley shifted his work towards TRANSIMS on high performance cluster computers based on his experience in high end computing, and is responsible for user support and TRANSIMS development at TRACC.