Introduction

PREP is a block parallel pre-processing tool for TRACE. It consists of several independent tasks. Only one task can be performed in each run. Many tasks can be executed in parallel using MPI. PREP contains in particular tasks for the following purposes:

pre-processing for aeroelasticity simulations, see Aeroelasticity Pre-processing
post-processing of adjoint solutions (adjoint pre-process), see Post-processing of Adjoint Solutions
create and remove analysis surfaces, see Analysis Surfaces
mesh partitioning and load balancing, see Mesh Partitioning and Load Balancing

In addition, there are various individual tasks for special purposes, see Tasks for Special Purposes.

Installation

The TRACE libraries are necessary to compile PREP. For the creation of analysis surfaces, also INTERSEC and the VTK library are needed.

Usage

To execute a task type

PREP -task [arguments] <option1> [arguments] <option2> [arguments] ...

All keywords (tasks/options) are parsed case insensitive while the arguments (filenames etc.) are treated as specified.

Command line options

Most tasks require a cgns file as input, which is specified using the option

-cgns/--cgnsFile

There are a few more ''general'' command line options of PREP which do not correspond to tasks or sub-options of tasks or apply for a large number of tasks:

Long option	Short option	Description
`--cgnsCompatibilityOff`		Deactivate the use of the CGNS 3 compatibility mode (relevant for tasks using cgns output) (always set using a 64bit CGNS library).
`--loadbalanceFile`	`-lb`	Specify a loadbalance file to be used by PREP (for tasks which can be executed in parallel)
`--help`	`-h`	Show help message and exit.
`--version`		Show version information and exit.

Getting Help

To get a list of the available tasks in PREP type

PREP --help

Typing

PREP --help --<task>

displays a list of (mandatory and optional) sub-options of this task. For the detailed documentation of the tasks of PREP see Tasks.