The code is a number of files plus an example FDS input file.

• parFDS.py - the code which orchestrates the calls to FDS and wrapping
• example_input_file.fds - an example modified FDS input template

Most of the important stuff takes place after the if name == 'main' in ParFDS.py

Here's a walkthrough:

The first line which defines 'input_file' tells the code where to look for the template input file.

Parameters are defined via an augmented FDS syntax which is parsed in the code base. Variables in this syntax for these parametric studies are {Variable_Name SWEEP First_Value, Second_Value, Nubmer_Steps}, where SWEEP is a protected word which lets ParFDS know that we will be attempting a linear parametric study in that variable.

The 'kwargs', dictionary sets things like:

• 'test_name' - which is the prefix appended to all the generated FDS input files and folder names
• 'base_path' - the name of the base folder which will contain the folders and input files generated by the code (assumed to be under the folder containing pafFDS.py)
• 'funct' : the actual subprocess call for fds_mpi (please see this function if you want to turn mpi on or off or set the -np flag for mpirun) if you are not using mpi it is a trivial change on the subprocess.call line.
• 'multiproc' is currently set to True, creating the multiprocessing pool used throughout.
• 'pool_size' the number of workers in the pool

Note, that if you use mpirun -np X and set pool_size to Y, the number of processes you will have running is X*Y at any one time as the code will spin up Y workers, which will each make an mpirun call, spinning up X processes.

The code is then run using the main function, with the syntax:

main(input_file, parameters, **kwargs)

One more thing: in the example_input_file.fds example file, certain of the variables are in curley braces eg. {COLD_TEMP SWEEP 20, 20, 1}. That is actually used for the variable replacement in Python, which occurs in build_input_files() in helper_functions.py. The point here is that if the key 'STEP_WMAX' exists in the parameters dictionary, and also exists in the FDS input file in the form {COLD_TEMP SWEEP 20, 20, 1}, the code will know to replace that string with the appropriate numerical value when it generates the input files.

Functional Note: the tests of this code have only been run under OS X and Ubuntu, so I am not sure at all if this code will balk on Windows. If you are going to use this on Windows, please ensure (at a minimum) that the command 'nosetests ./tests/*.py' run at the command prompt passes first.