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Using UTK Executables

Linking and Building

To build executable, the following commands are necessary : 

mkdir build
cd build
# Install to specified location, every executable will be located in the 
# YOUR_INSTALL_DIR/bin folder. 
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=. .. 
make install -j 8 # Or whatever number of threads you want

Executable will be located in src/samplers and src/metrics folders and, if make install is run, to the specified directory (without distinction).

File formats

Currently, two differents file formats are supported : text and binary.

  • Text files: No header. Each line represents a point, and coordinates are separated by spaces. Pointsets (eg. realizations of the same point process) are separated by ‘#’.
  • Binary files: The first 20 bytes are the header: 4 bytes for the magic number, 4 bytes for the meta data, 4 bytes for the number of pointsets, 4 bytes for the number of points in each pointset and 4 bytes for the number of dimensions. After the header, data is stored consecutively.

Executables identifies file formats by their extension: “.bin” for binary and everything else will be treated as text files.

Details for binary file format:

  • Magic number is : 0x214B5455 (“UTK!” in binary)
  • Metadata is composed of 4 bytes : 0: data type code, 1: unused, 2: unused, 3: unused
  • Data type codes are : 0: int, 1: long int, 2: uint, 3: long uint, 4: float, 5: double

Miscellaneous notes

  • All samplers have common parameters -n for number of points, -d for dimension, -m for numbers of point sets to generate and -s for seeds. Note that some option might be ignored for samples that have fixed dimension (2D only) or are deterministic (Sobol’ without scrambling).

  • All metrics have common parameters -i for the input file or -o for output. The behaviour when multiples point sets are given is the same file might differ : Spectrum will return an average of all point sets but Discrepancy a list of values for each one.

  • UTK uses common names for most samplers and metrics. If that conflicts with other libraries, one can use cmake -DUTK_EXE_PREFIX=utk_ .. to add prefix to executable names.

  • Silent option is not total : First, only utk logs are silenced. If the sampler or metrics depends on an external code, the output are not silenced… Still, there is one log that is not silenced : the failure of a sampler.