The command for running DAKOTA on a single processor and exploiting asynchronous local parallelism is,
dakota -i dakota.in > dakota.out
dakota.in is the input file, dakota.out as the output file. By default DAKOTA wrties a restart file on execution, to read an existing DAKOTA restart file,
dakota -i dakota.in -read_restart dakota.rst > dakota.out
Multiprocessor execution,
mpirun -np 4 dakota -i dakota.in > dakota.out
mpirun -machinefile machines -np 4 dakota -i dakota.in > dakota.out
An issue that can arise with these command line arguments is that the mpirun script distributed with MPICH has been observed to have problems with certain file path specifications (e.g., a relative path such as "../some_file")
DAKOTA input is governed by the IDR input specification file. This file (dakota.input.spec) is used by a code generator to create parsing system components which are compiled into the DAKOTA executable. Therefore, dakota.input.spec is the definitive source for input syntax, capability options, and optional and required capability sub-parameters. Beginning users may find this file more confusing than helpful and, in this case, adaptation of example input files to a particular problem may be a more effective approach.
Detailed description of dakota.input.spec file with sample dakota.in files
DAKOTA input file format slides,
Input File Format in DAKOTAInterfacing Mechanism in DAKOTADetailed description of various specifications in a DAKOTA input file
Thanks,
Vinay Rao
