Drone 1.01 User's Guide

Theodore C. Belding
The CAR Group (Michael Cohen, Robert Axelrod, and Rick Riolo)
University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems
<mailto:Ted.Belding@umich.edu>
<http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~streak/>

November 13, 1996

Abstract:

Drone is a tool for automatically running batch jobs of a simulation program. It allows sweeps over arbitrary sets of parameters, as well as multiple runs for each parameter set, with a separate random seed for each run. The runs may be executed either on a single computer or over the Internet on a set of remote hosts. Drone is written in Expect [4] (an extension to the Tcl [6, 10] scripting language) and runs under Unix. It was originally designed for use with the Swarm agent-based simulation framework [5], but Drone can be used with any simulation program that reads parameters from the command line or from an input file. This document describes how to install and use Drone.

• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
  • What Is Drone?
  • Copyright Information
  • Typographic Conventions
• RUNNING DRONE
  • Installing Drone
  • Getting the Documentation
  • A Concrete Example
  • Basic Operation
    • Standard Mode
    • Dry-Run Mode
    • Collation Mode
    • Other Options
• CONFIGURING DRONE
  • The Control File
    • Control File Syntax
    • Control File Parameters
    • A Sample Control File
  • The Host File
    • Host File Syntax
    • A Sample Host File
  • The Target Program
    • Target Program Requirements
    • Using Drone With an Existing Program
    • Using Drone With an Adapter Script
    • Using Drone With a Swarm Program
    • Programs That Execute a Simulation Multiple Times
• REPRODUCING EXPERIMENTS
  • Reproducing an Entire Experiment
  • Reproducing a Single Case
  • Reproducing a Single Run
• INTERNAL OPERATION
  • Generating Random Seeds
  • Password Security
• TROUBLESHOOTING
  • Bugs, Blemishes, and Limitations
  • Debugging
  • Future Directions
• Acknowledgements
• URLs
• References
• About this document ...