# 9. Output

Sierra/SM produces a variety of output. This chapter discusses how to control the four major types of output:

- results output,

- history output,

- heartbeat output, and

- restart output.

The user is allowed to select a set of variables (internal, user-defined, or some combination thereof) for results output. If the user selects a nodal variable such as displacement for results output, the displacements for all the nodes in a model will be output to a results file. If the user selects an element variable such as stress for results output, the stress for all elements in the model that calculate this quantity (stress) will be output. The history output option lets the user select a specific set of information for output. For example, if the displacement at a particular node is critical, then the user may select only the displacement at that node as history output. The heartbeat output is similar to the history output except that the output is written to a text file instead of to a binary (exodusII [[1]]) file. The restart output is written so that any calculation can be halted at some arbitrary analysis time and then restarted at this time. The user has no control over what is written to the restart file. When a restart file is written, it must be a complete state description of the calculations at some given time. A restart file contains a great deal of information and is typically larger than a results file; thus the restart file output frequency must be chosen with care.

Section 9.1 describes the syntax for requesting output variables. Section 9.3 describes the results output. Included in the results output is a description of commands for user-defined output (Section 9.4). User-defined output lets the user post process analysis results as the code is running to produce a reduced set of output information. Section 9.6 describes the history output, Section 9.7 describes the heartbeat output, and Section 9.8 describes the restart output. All four types of output (results, history, heartbeat, and restart) can be synchronized for analyses with multiple regions. This scheduling functionality is discussed in Section 9.9. Section 9.10 describes the commands for performing output variable interpolation. Section 9.11 defines the output options for energy and rigid body global variables, which are defined at the region scope. Finally, in Section 9.12, there is a list of key variables. Unless otherwise noted, the command blocks and command lines discussed in Section 9 appear in the region scope.

[1]

L.A. Schoof and V.R. Yarberry. EXODUS II: a finite element data model. Technical Report SAND92-2137, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, September 1994. URL: http://infoserve.sandia.gov/sand_doc/1992/922137.pdf.