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Altair FlowTracer User Guide
FlowTracer is a complete system to create, manage, and execute design flows.
Create a FlowTracer Project
Each Project Needs a Server Host

Welcome
What's New
View new features for FlowTracer 2025.1.0.
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
  This chapter will cover how you can use your web browser to manage FlowTracer.
- Command Line Interface
  The Altair Accelerator products have a rich set of programs that can be run on the shell command line.
- Create Sets with Selection Rules
- Advanced Information
- Troubleshooting
- Create a FlowTracer Project
  - Project Creation Overview
  - Each Project Needs a Server Host
  - Project Creation Command
  - Start the vovserver
  - Connect to a Project via the Command Line
    To connect to a VOV project, get a list of the projects with vovproject list, and then enable the selected project.
  - Troubleshooting: Cannot Enable Project
  - Shutting Down a Project
  - Destroy a Project
    A project must be stopped before it can be destroyed.
  - Sanity Check for vovserver
    The command sanity is used to perform checks on the consistency of the trace and of other internal data structures.
- 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

Each Project Needs a Server Host

When you create a project, you start up the FlowTracer system which runs an instance of the vovserver program. You should pick a host to run the vovserver program that has resources to run the system efficiently.

The vovserver program can run on a host that meets the following requirements:

The host has access to all the jobs (executables) and their input and output files, directly or through network filesystems (such as NFS).
The host has adequate main memory: at least 64MB of RAM for traces with 20,000 files in the trace -each node in the trace uses about 1kB of RAM.

If the majority of the project files are stored in file systems residing on a single host (the file server), then the vovserver program is best run on that host to avoid possible complications due to NFS or unsynchronized clocks. If internal policies or technical reasons discourage running the vovserver program on the host holding the majority of files, then any other host can be used.

The combination of host:port used for a project must be unique among all running instances of the vovserver program. It is not recommended to start vovserver programs with the same project name on different hosts; this leads to confusion for the users. However, running multiple instances of the vovserver program with different project names on the same host is an acceptable practice.