Troubleshooting
This page lists some common problems you may have when using SAO solar system simulator and possible solutions. If you encounter these problems and our suggested solutions do not work, please email Sarah with exactly what the problem is and we'll do our best to help you out.
- My job failed to run. What went wrong?
The most likely reason is that there was a stale NFS file handle in the supercomputer. This is an intermittent problem with the operating system (at our end), and may occasionally cause jobs to end prematurely. Always try running the same job twice (so just go "back" and re-run) before contacting us!
Most "bad" input parameters or combinations of parameters should give you an error before the job actually runs (e.g. eccentricity must be less than zero). However, we may have missed some! So first try to re-run your job, and if it fails again, then let us know exactly what parameters and which section of which module you were attempting to run.
- Every time I run a new job and look at the results, the image/animation looks the same! What's going on??
Depending on what you web browser has the cache set to. The cache is used to keep local copies of documents to reduce connection time to the network, so this means your computer will store a local copy of, e.g. lastgraph.gif, and so when you re-run a job, your computer displays the locally stored copy of lastgraph.gif rather than the new version. To see the most recent copy, you should just be be to "reload" or "refresh" your browser, or maybe you'll need "shift-reload" or "shift-refresh".
If all else fails, you can clear your web browser's cache. If you're using Netscape, you should click on [edit] [preferences] [advanced] [cache] and then click on "clear disk cache". If you're using Internet Explored, you should click on [view] [options] [advanced], then click on cache "empty".
- My animated gifs run so slowly because they take ages to download...
Right click on the animated gif and save it to a directory on your local machine (renaming as necessary). You can then open the gif file you have saved in Netscape or IE and you won't have the time lag.
- What do I do with files in the data directories that end in .gz??
If a file has the extension file.gz, then this means it is a compressed file. To uncompress it, you can use either WinZip under Windows, StuffIt if you use a Mac, or the "gunzip" command under linux.
- What do I do with the csv files in the data directories?
If a file has the extension file.csv, then this means it is a comma delimited text file and is usually a data table. You can open csv files with excel, or you can use gnuplot if you're using linux. For more information about what to do with your csv files, follow this link to our Excel Primer, or this link for our GNUplot Primer.
- How do a plot data on my own computer?
You'll be able to download some of the data as csv files, which you can plot with either Excel if you're using Windows or a Mac, or GNUplot if you're using linux or Mac.
Back to....
Solar System Dynamics Project page
Solar System Dynamics "How To" page
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