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Altair FlowTracer User Guide
FlowTracer is a complete system to create, manage, and execute design flows.
Command Line Interface
The Altair Accelerator products have a rich set of programs that can be run on the shell command line.

Welcome
What's New
View new features for FlowTracer 2025.1.2.
FlowTracer Overview
An advanced mission critical dependency management platform for developing and executing flows.
FlowTracer Tutorials
Discover FlowTracer functionality with interactive tutorials.
Altair FlowTracer User Guide
FlowTracer is a complete system to create, manage, and execute design flows.
- FlowTracer Roles
  When using FlowTracer in large deployments, three main roles emerge: Administrator, Developer and User. In smaller organizations, a given person may have multiple roles, but the duties of each role still exist.
- Introduction to VOV
  FlowTracer is derived from the system "VOV" originally developed at UC-Berkeley. The word "VOV" is not an acronym, but can be thought of as a contraction of the word "evolve".
- Concepts and Terminology
- Run, Rerun, Stop and Kill Jobs
  The act of requesting FlowTracer to bring a particular target up-to-date is sometimes called a Retrace Request or more simply a Retrace.
- Find, Remove and Clean Files
- Graphical User Interface
- Browser Interface
  The URL to the FlowTracer web server is the entry point into the FlowTracer web application for managing the product. The URL is composed of a domain name and a port number and the path to the web application.
- Command Line Interface
  The Altair Accelerator products have a rich set of programs that can be run on the shell command line.
  - List Files in Directory - Showing Project Status
  - List Jobs from Project Having a Given Directory
  - Start Run - Run Jobs Depending on Changed Inputs
  - Show Information About Current Project
    The command line program vsi reports basic statistics about the current project.
  - Show the History of a File or Job Within the Project
  - Impact of Changing a File or Node
  - Why a Node Has its Current Status
  - List Inputs and Outputs of a Node for Navigation
  - Clean Out Stuck, Unproductive Nodes
  - Run Tcl Scripts that Use Tcl Extensions
  - vovps
    vovps lists all processes, similar to the UNIX command ps. It is useful to understand the process hierarchy of Accelerator jobs, and sometimes to find which PIDs to kill in a shell.
  - Search Log Files
    vovsearchlog searches log files that are daily generated by server, taskers and daemons.
- Create Sets with Selection Rules
- Advanced Information
- Troubleshooting
- Create a FlowTracer Project
- Resource Management
  Altair Accelerator includes a subsystem for managing computing resources. This allows the design team to factor in various constraints regarding hardware and software resources, as well as site policy constraints.
- Rename Nodes
  Renaming of nodes is a task for more advanced users. In most cases, it is simpler to forget all nodes and rebuild the trace from scratch.
- Miscellaneous
- Reports
Altair FlowTracer Administrator Guide
This manual is aimed at the person who will be the administrator for FlowTracer. This person will be responsible for configuring the network resources, setting up the licensing, and establishing security and access rules for the system.
Altair FlowTracer Developer Guide

View All Altair Accelerator Help

Command Line Interface

The Altair Accelerator products have a rich set of programs that can be run on the shell command line.

Each program performs a specific task and is controlled by a set of command line parameters. The programs provide a usage command when run with a -h parameter as a quick way to understand what each does and what parameters it takes.

This section describes the programs that a user will find useful. There are other programs described in the Developer and Admin manuals that are useful for their situations.

Common Commands


vovproject	Create, start, enable, stop a project.
vovconsole	Start the Graphical User Interface (GUI).
vovcheck	Run many checks on the setup of VOV.
vls	List the status of the files with respect to the dependency graph.
vsc	Show the consequences of changing one node.
vsh	Report the history of a file or a job.
vsi	Report the basic Information about the graph.
vsm	Monitor taskers, jobs, resources.
vsr	Issue a retrace request.
vst	Show tools executed in the current directory.
vsx	Show inputs and outputs of nodes.
vsy	Show why a node is not VALID.
vsz	Zap away bad nodes.

Main User Commands


vovblast	Simultaneously remove and forget files
vovbrowser	Report the URL to start the browser interface, including the right `port number` for a project.
vovbuild	Build complex flows.
vovcleandir	Eliminate old log files that are no longer part of the flow.
vovfind	Find file nodes in the graph.
vovfire	Execute a job "here and now".
vovforget	Forget objects in the in-memory database: nodes, sets, users, etc.
vovkill	Kill a process and all of its children.
vovjobqueue	Show all jobs in the queue.
vovrename	Rename nodes in the graph.
vovset	Create, edit, forget sets.
vovsh	The main client, with extended Tcl interpreter.
vovshow	Show things: users, buckets, nodes, sets, etc.
vovstop	Stop things: jobs, projects, retraces, ...
vovtouch	Toggle status of nodes.
vovversion	Show the version of the current installation.

Other Commands


vovshowconnection	Show connection path between two nodes in the graph.
vovcheckfiles	Force a check of all timestamps.
vovflowcompiler	Compile a flow to be included into the Flow Library.
vovprop	Add, modify and delete properties on files and jobs.
vovrestoretrace	Restore a corrupted graph either from a backup or from a saved copy.
vovwait4server	Wait for the server to be operative.
vovxrsh	Open a new `xterm` with the DISPLAY variable properly set (UNIX only).
vovsearchlog	Search log files with a regular expression

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