This is a C API which can communicate with an APSIM Server to rapidly re-run an apsim simulation with modified parameter values. Traditionally, this would be achieved by using the apsim CLI (Models.exe) but apsim's startup is (relatively) slow and the initialisation overheads often exceed the actual simulation runtimes. The apsim server will load the simulation and perform the associated initialisation once only, and thereafter the simulations can be run with almost no overhead. This is useful for tasks such as parameter optimisation, sensitivity analysis, etc.
This repository contains:
- A C library which implements the communications protocol to interact with an apsim server
- An example application which uses the library
- Unit tests suite
Compilation requires that GNU make/gcc and pkg-config are installed. This can be built on windows via WSL.
Building/running the unit tests requires that libcheck is installed.
On Ubuntu/WSL:
apt update
apt install -y build-essential check pkg-config gitmake
make install (requires root)
This will install to the /usr/local prefix by default.
The public API contains 5 functions:
connectToServer(): Connect to a local server (via unix socket)connectToRemoteServer(): Connect to a remote server (TCP connection)runWithChanges(): Run the simulations with certain changesreadOutput(): Read certain outputs from the serverdisconnectFromServer(): Disconnect from the server
The repository contains a dockerfile which will build a minimal image containing the apsim client library. An official image is available on dockerhub
Client connects on 127.0.0.1:$PORT
Server listens on docker 0.0.0.0:$PORT
docker run --rm -it -p $PORT:$PORT -v $inputs:/inputs apsiminitiative/apsimng-server:latest -p $PORT