[Radiance-general] Error: rtcontrib: fatal - incomplete ray value from rtrace

[Greg Ward]

Hi David,

I've never encountered this error before.  It sounds like your rtrace process might be dying, but it would normally report an error message if that were the case.  The only case when rtrace doesn't report an error is when the system kills it with signal 9.  Does the calculation proceed for some time before the error occurs, or does it bail right away?

You say you ran the command successfully before.  What, exactly, did you do differently when you got this error?  Are you running it on a different machine, which might have data or file size limits in place?

-Greg

> From: David Appelfeld <d.appelfeld at gmail.com>
> Date: May 19, 2011 3:27:04 PM PDT
> 
> Dear Radiance users, 
> 
> I am running calculation of grid of illuminance sensors and recently I have got several times this error message:
> 
> rtcontrib: fatal - incomplete ray value from rtrace
> 
> Does anyone have had this before or do you have any suggestion where I should look for mistakes, I guess there could be several reason for this error, but I don't know where to start. The rtcontrib command is as following. I have run this several times because I split the grid and run more simulations, and it was without problems even running several parallel simulations in same time using same octree. I am submitting calculations on our cluster which operating on Sun machines and using GridEngine.
> 
> rtcontrib @parameters/vmx_illum.opt -f klems_int.cal -bn Nkbins -fo -o results/vmx_test_grid_illum/%s.vmx \
> -b kbinW @parameters/west.modifier -b kbinS @parameters/south.modifier -I+ oct/model_vmx.oct < sensors/grid/vmx_grid_test_illum.pts
> 
> Thank you for any suggestions
> David