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10.2 Side Effects on Simulators

Automatic control and execution of heterogeneous simulation tools does not only concern the controlling environment, but also the tools themselves. Aside from the basic need to accept initial data from other tools in some formgif, a certain conduct has to be followed in order to cooperate with other simulators. The reasonable treatment of error conditions, including the generation of concise and helpful error messages, returning appropriate exit codes, and closing files that have been opened during the program run before the program exits, as well as refraining from producing large amounts of unsolicited output that is only helpful for the tool developer, are to be mentioned. Moreover, a certain degree of tolerance and flexibility with respect to the input data and to the class of problems to solve proved to be extremely important. Given the ability to automatically control large sets of experiments, many deficiencies and nuisances have been eliminated from the tools used as a result of deploying them in a greater context.



Christoph Pichler
Thu Mar 13 14:30:47 MET 1997