Run and Stop a Job

An emulator job is submitted in the same manner as a typical Altair Accelerator job, with a few additional features to deal with the complexity of scheduling jobs on an emulator. The two main differences are the emulation specific resources that must be specified and the presence of a hero_adapter wrapper.

Submit an Emulation Job

To submit an emulation job use the following format:

nc run -r HERO:<group>_<target> -- hero_adapter <user command>

The resource HERO:<group>_<target> needs some elaboration. Each type of emulator defines certain targets (for example, SPAN3 corresponds to a 3 board Palladium job). The resource HERO:<group>_<target> conjoins all of the emulator targets in a group that define a given target into a single resource string.

As an illustration, in the demo example, to submit a two board job to the Palladium group, a two module job to the ZeBu and a HAPS job, use the following commands (the group names here are particular to the demo example):

nc run -r HERO:PZ1_SPAN2 -- hero_adapter sleep 20
nc run -r HERO:Z4_SPAN2 -- hero_adapter sleep 20
nc run -r HERO:HAPS100_SPAN1 -- hero_adapter sleep 20

The following command shows the status and placement (as appropriate) for Hero jobs:

nc cmd vovselect id, status, statusnc, lasttaskername, prop.HERO_EMUL_NAME, prop.HERO_PPLACEMENT from jobs -where resources~HERO

Stop an Emulation Job

Stopping an emulation job requires more care than other jobs so that the user command has an appropriate chance to respond to the signals. It is important to send the relevant signals to the appropriate process. In particular, the vw and hero_adapter wrapper commands need to be excluded.

The format of the command is as follows:

nc stop -skiptop 1 -exclude vovsh <jobid...>

The -skiptop 1 and -exclude vovsh options ensure the stopping signals are passed through to the user command. For more advanced options for the stop subcommand please refer to the Accelerator documentation. It is likely that the signal sequence will need to be specified along with delays so that the emulator jobs can be stopped gracefully.

Some EDA tools start child processes that are not terminated when the main tool process ends which can result in unnecessary process load. The tasker.childProcessCleanup configuration parameter (see Clean up Processes Left Behind by Completed Jobs) can be used to address this issue.