HyperStudy Tips and Tricks: #8 - The Power of HyperStudy Archives

Hello Design Explorers,

Is this the first time you've heard about archives? Or maybe you are familiar with archives but want to learn more about it. Read this blog to become an archives expert.

The archive functionality is one of HyperStudy's most popular features that improves usability. With this feature you can easily store, share and move studies.

From the File menu, you can select:

• Export to package the study's files into a single .hstx file that is easy to handle.
• Import to un-packages the archived *.hstx file at a given location.

Now that you know the basics of using the archive feature you can take advantage of this functionality any time you need to:

• Share your exploration studies with a colleague: From your machine, you can export the *.hstx and then send it over to your colleague. Once they have imported the archive into HyperStudy on their machine they will then have access to the entire study as you had it, including study and result files (without the solving files to reduce the size).

• Share your study with Altair support: Have you ever been ask, “Could you please share your study archive?”. This is one of the first things a support agent will ask when they are trying to help you troubleshoot an unexpected behavior you may see on your side.

• Move a study at another location locally or remotely: Don't zip your study files (*.hstudy, approaches,..)! Export the archive, then copy/paste the *.hstx at the new location and import it from there. The archives are using relatives paths to resource files, which make them safer compared to a zipped folder.

What to learn even more?

It is also possible to import/export a custom study archive *.hstxc and specify which files and/or directories you would like to package or not.

For instance, you might need to prepare a DOE study locally on your machine and run it on a cluster to leverage on HPC. This can be easily achieved by performing the following steps:

1. Create the DOE locally on your machine.
2. From the Evaluate step, disable the Execute and Extract tasks (keep Write tasks only).
3. Evaluate the Write tasks. This creates all run directories and populates the input files.
4. Export the custom archive with Model Resource and Run Directories selected. This creates two files: *.hstxc and *.hsty
   
5. Copy both files from your machine to the cluster and run the evaluations from there.

Does this help? Let us know your feedback.

Altair Team.