BTEC

Running

Output Files

BTEC can (and will) generate many different output files. What BTEC outputs, and how often it does so, can be configured (see Configuring). The output files can be separated into two categories: Sensor output and non-Sensor output.

(Warning: historical digression follows) Originally, BTEC's output comparability was a single log interval, so that the user could tell BTEC how often to output data, but all data files were output at each log interval. This caused several problems, including inconvenience, so the ability to specify a log interval for each type of data separately. This allowed the user to "turn off" logging of some data types that were not important for their applications. This also made it possible to output the data of interest at a shorter log interval than the other data types (for example, writing the temperature distribution every time step, while only writing the laser source term every 1000 time steps) so that high resolution graphs could be created without filling the hard drive (Lt. Wooddell once filled an entire 2 TB hard drive by running BTEC with all logging turned on and leaving the simulation to run over night.) While this new capability was a great improvement, it still generated much more data than was typically needed. A common use scenario for BTEC involved running BTEC for several different laser beam configurations and plotting the temperature at a specific point (such as the point at the center of the beam on the tissue surface) as a function of time.

Sensors where introduced to solve this problem.