Dakota Beginner’s Tutorial

This section is intended for users who are new to Dakota, to demonstrate the basics of running a simple example.

First Steps

After downloading Dakota, make sure that Dakota runs. You should see Dakota version information when you type dakota -v.
Create a working directory.
Copy rosen_multidim.in from the dakota/share/dakota/examples/users/ directory to your working directory.
From the working directory, run:

dakota -i rosen multidim.in -o rosen multidim.out > rosen multidim.stdout

Dakota outputs a large amount of information to help users track progress. Four files should have been created:

The screen output has been redirected to the file rosen_multidim.stdout. The contents are messages from Dakota and notes about the progress of the iterator (i.e. method/algorithm).
The output file rosen_multidim.out contains information about the function evaluations.
rosen_multidim.dat is created due to the specification of a tabular data file. This summarizes the variables and responses for each function evaluation.
dakota.rst is a restart file. If a Dakota analysis is interrupted, it can be often be restarted without losing all progress. Dakota has some data processing capabilities for output analysis. The output file will contain the relevant results. In this case, the output file has details about each of the 81 function evaluations. For more advanced or customized data processing or visualization, the tabular data file can be imported into another analysis tool.