E@h client file formats and command line parameters info?
20 Feb 2005 11:30:50 UTC
Topic 187754
(moderation:
Dear Prof. Allen and all other Einstein@home developers,
I'm the author of a little add-on program for BOINC. I like the Einstein@home project very much, and for this reason I'd like to extend my little utility to provide as much information as it can about the computation being performed. Is there any documentation available for the file formats and/or the command line parameters of the Einstein@home client?
In case there isn't, I'd be very grateful if you could answer a few questions.
First of all, here is what I know so far (or, rather I believe I know - please correct me where I'm wrong). The work performed by the E@h client can be divided in three phases: in the first two, the client looks for signals in two distinct time intervals, and in the third one it combines the data obtained in the first two phases. Consequently, the command line arguments (tag "command_line" in the client_state.xml file) are divided in three parts, separated by "//". My questions focus on the first two phases:
1) the -f command line parameter appears to be used to specify a frequency. Is this expressed in MHz?
2) are the --startTime and --endTime numbers times in UNIX format (if so, the data being scanned is very old, dating back to 1993-1994)?
3) the Fthreshold value in the configuration file seems to indicate some signal power threshold. Is this correct? What unit of measure is it expressed in?
Based on the assumption that answers to (1) and (2) are affirmative, I already wrote a preliminary extension to my program to display some additional information about Einstein@home workunits. Here is a screenshot. Is the information displayed accurate?
Thanks in advance for your help,
- Roberto
PS. I'm aware that there's a thread discussing the feasibility of publishing the source code. While having access to the E@h source code would be great, at this time I'm more interested in documentation about the file formats.
E@h client file formats and command line parameters info?
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1) no. Hz. 2) these are GPS timestamps. 3) "is this correct?" no. It's a threshold to certain values in the _output_, not in the input, to prevent the output files from getting too large.
BM
BM
Bernd, thanks for the
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Bernd,
thanks for the prompt response. I've corrected my program according to the information you provided. GPS uses 00:00:00 1/6/1980 as epoch, so the times now look reasonably recent :-). I've replaced the previous screenshot with one of the corrected version.
Thanks again,
- Roberto
> Is there any documentation
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> Is there any documentation available for the file formats and/or the
> command line parameters of the Einstein@home client?
Nope, none that is publicly available and recent enough. They both have undergone significant changes during the development of E@H and may continue to do so.
BM
BM