Running SIXTE simulations on the cluster

This page gives a short overview of setting up and running SIXTE simulations on the Remeis cluster. Do read the simulator manual if you are not familiar with SIXTE!

Getting the tools

You typically do not need to install SIXTE for yourself on the cluster - instead, you can use the module system. The command

module load sixte

will provide all the tools as well as the $SIMPUT and $SIXTE environment variables used in the next sections.

By default, the above call will load the newest publicly released version of SIXTE. If you are testing new features, you can get the "bleeding edge" version of SIXTE (reflecting the current stage of the `main` development branch) using the call

module load sixte/bleeding

Instrument files

After loading the module, instrument files for many missions are avaiable under

$SIXTE/share/sixte/instruments

If you think that files are missing, please contact the developers!

Slurm scripts

If you are running SIXTE or SIMPUT tools in a slurm script, you will need to add the following lines to the beginning of your script:

export HEADASNOQUERY=
export HEADASPROMPT=/dev/null

These environment variables disable the interactive parameter handling, which would otherwise fail.