CMFSTART file

In each version folder there is a file called CMFSTART, which contains some additional instructions which are sent to GEMPACK prior to solving the model.

Use View...CMFSTART file to view or edit this file. When a new version is created, the CMFSTART file is created as a copy of a file called CMFSTART.DEF in the main RunGTAP folder.

CMFSTART.DEF contains the following lines:

CPU = yes; ! log show simulation times

NDS = yes; ! no displays

! servants=1; ! use 2 processors at once, if possible

Extrapolation accuracy file = NO ; ! No XAC file

If you want to produce an Extrapolation accuracy (XAC) file (but beware, the XAC file can be very large) you would change the line above to:

Extrapolation accuracy file = YES; ! Make XAC file

Characters following an exclamation mark are treated as a comment (ie, ignored). So the line:

! servants=1; ! use 2 processors at once, if possible

is inactive. You could remove the first exclamation mark to activate it then GEMPACK would try to speed up the solution by parallelizing the computation: see Using parallel processing.

A main use of the CMFSTART file is to create new sets which you can use in shock statements: see XSETS and the CMFSTART file.

Conceivably, you could add other types of statements to the CMFSTART file -- assuming you have a deep and long-standing knowledge of the GEMPACK system. The contents of that file become the first part of the CMF file sent to GTAP.EXE each time a simulation is run.

One rash fellow added the following 2 lines to CMFSTART:

file gtapDATA2 = VersionDir\basedat2.har; ! in version dir

Updated file gtapDATA2 = gdat2.upd; ! in work dir

His intention was to use an extra input data file for a specially modified GTAP model. Even though this contradicts the clear instructions given in Notes for Module Developers, the above lines seemed to work!

Indeed RunGTAP seems to encourage such behaviour: if you include the string VersionDir in a line of CMFSTART, RunGTAP replaces that string with the name of the version folder. Similarly, HomeDir is replaced with the name of the RunGTAP folder.

If you keep changing the CMFSTART file between simulations in strange ways, your EXP experiment files might no longer be capable of reproducing previous simulations -- when you run a simulation, the current CMFSTART is used. There are 2 ways you might be able to recover previous versions of CMFSTART. First, when you save an EXP file, the CMFSTART file is saved within it as a comment. Second, after a simulation the CMF file (which contains CMFSTART) is stored in the SAVESIMS subdirectory of the current version folder.

URL of this topic: www.copsmodels.com/webhelp/rungtap/hc_cmfstart.htm

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