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
  - Set Names
    Every set has a name and the name must be unique.
  - Selection Rules
    Selection rules are used to create sets and to perform queries.
  - Regular Expressions in Selection Rules
  - Time Specifications
    Some VOV procedures and commands accept as input a time specification, which is a string that contains a mixture of digits and the letters s m h d w.
- 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

Regular Expressions in Selection Rules

The operators ~, !~, ~~ and !~~, which perform string matching, operate with regular expressions (Tcl 8.0). These expressions use the ed syntax. For a complete description of the syntax, invoke one of the following commands:

% man -s n regexp
% man ed

The following is a short summary of the syntax for regular expressions.

The period "." stands for any character.
The asterisk "*" stands for zero or more repetitions of the previous expression.
The plus "+" stands for one or more repetitions of the previous expression.
A backslash \ can be used to escape a literal period, asterisk or plus sign.

Examples

The regular expression ".*" matches every string (any character repeated any number of times).

If you want to make a set of all the files whose name contains .std., specify the regular expression "\.std\..*", in which "\." matches the period.