Installation Notes

The following steps are required before you can use TimeNET on your system. If there is already a TimeNET installation on your system and you only want to set up a new user, you may go directly to setting up a new user. Please make sure that your hard- and software environment complies with the requirements.

Step 1: Registration

In order to download TimeNET, you first have to fill out and send a registration form. The page on how to get TimeNET describes this step.

Step 2: Download TimeNET

After your successful registration, we will send an email with the user name and password for the TimeNET download area to you. Use your web browser to download the files you need. According to your target architecture you should download one of the available precompiled TimeNET files.

Step 3: Install TimeNET

The tool can be installed into any user account in a directory TimeNET. TimeNET contains several shell scripts which work in csh and tcsh. Please make sure that you use one of these shells.

• Copy the compressed tar file obtained by ftp into the home directory of the target account.
• Use gunzip (the same as gzip -d) to uncompress the file.
  gunzip
  file

  .tar.gz

• Use tar to extract the directories and files from the archive.
  tar -xvf
  file

  .tar

To use the tool directly from the account is has been installed in, you also have to set up this account as a new user as described below.

Step 4: Set up a new user

The tool can be used by several users simultaneuously. Assume TimeNET has been installed on your system in the directory /home/timenet/TimeNET. Each new user has to follow the following steps, if his or her home directory is /home/tnuser:

• set the shell environment variable TNETHOME to the directory where TimeNET is installed (e.g. if your login shell is a tcsh, add the line setenv TNETHOME /home/timenet/TimeNET to your file /home/tnuser/.cshrc)
• create a directory where your models will be stored, e.g. mkdir /home/tnuser/Models
• set the shell environment variable MODELDIR to this directory (e.g. if your login shell is a tcsh, add the line setenv MODELDIR /home/tnuser/Models to your file /home/tnuser/.cshrc) Warning: The MODELDIR variable must not contain a trailing /, or there will be errors during evaluation algorithms!
• The path of the graphical user interface of TimeNET should be included in your path variable (e.g. if your login shell is a tcsh, add the line set path = ( $path $TNETHOME/Agnes/bin ) to your file /home/tnuser/.cshrc)
• Copy and check the TimeNET configuration file. The tool distribution contains a sample configuration file called ".TimeNET" which must be located in the home directory of each user. An Example can be found in Example_.TimeNET. The configuration file specifies whether some evaluation components can be executed on a cluster of workstations in parallel. Add the host names of usable workstations between the lines HOSTLISTSTART and HOSTLISTEND. A detailed explanation of this configuration file is given below.

Step 5: Start the tool

If all previous steps have been successfully completed, the tool can be started using the command TimeNET in your X Windows environment. Some example models can be found in the download area. If you encounter problems during the installation, you can send an email to the main timenet contact address (see adress).

Please report bugs that have not been encountered yet (see the list of known bugs) using the bug report form.

The configuration file .TimeNET

The distributed tar file contains a sample configuration file called ".TimeNET" which must be located in the home directory of each TimeNET user. The configuration file should be modified in order to allow some evaluation components to run in parallel on a cluster of workstations. In the following the entries of the file are explained:

• FORCE DISTRIBUTED EXECUTION
  All evaluation programms are executed at several computers in a net of workstations (see below), regardless which option is chosen in the corresponding menue of the user interface.
• FORCE LOCAL EXECUTION
  This is the other alternative for FORCE DISTRIBUTED EXECUTION
• MAX PROCESSES PER HOST
  number

  
  number of processes per host started by evaluation programms, recommended value: 1

• MAX SIMULATION PROCESSES TOTAL

  
  max. number of simulation replications started by the distributed simulation, recommended values: 5 (simple experiments), 10 (long simulation runs), 20 (max.useful value)

• HOSTLISTSTART
  Keyword for the begin of a list of different hosts which can be used for the distributed evaluation and simulation.

  HOSTLISTSTART hostname1 hostname2 USE ALWAYS myhost .. HOSTLISTEND 

  Each line contains one hostname. TimeNET checks the hosts for being occupied by a user logged in on console. A host with a user logged in or with a load > 2.0 will not be used, unless its name is preceded by the USE ALWAYS keywords.
  Warning: if your system uses ssh security for rsh, all hosts specified in the .TimeNET file need to be in the list of trusted hosts (~/.ssh/known_hosts), or some of the distributed algorithms might hang up. You should log into each host once for this.
• EPSILON

  
  accuracy for the numerical solution programs, recommeded value: 1e-15