Users Guide

FOAM Users Guide

This Guide began as the "Notes on using FOAM". Users are encouraged to add to this guide to fill in needed details.

Quick Start

Many coupled systems come with one massive shell script which combines the build system and run system: it compiles the code, copies data files and executables into place, and runs the model. FOAM keeps the compile and run systems separate. This makes development somewhat easier because the build system consists of just makefiles and source code. For runtime, FOAM does not provide a one-script-does-all shell script because the parallel platforms FOAM runs on offer so many different choices for queue software, filesystems, mass store, etc. that an all purpose script, if it was possible to build, would be excessively long and hard to debug.

Instead, we describe below the general procedure for setting up a FOAM run directory. If you choose, you can incorporate this into a shell script appropriate for your system.