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Why the name Piraņa?
Pirana is a Resourceful Assistant in NONMEM Analysis.
I don't have a cluster, can I use Piraņa?
Yes. Piraņa can be used both for local modeling (on your own PC), or for modeling on a remote cluster (trough an SSH connection), or for setting up a PCluster.
Does Piraņa run on Windows Vista or Windows 7?
Yes, no problem. But note that NONMEM on Vista could get you into trouble...
Where does Piraņa store the notes I make in the model overview?
Piraņa stores your notes in a database-file ('pirana.dir') in the current folder. So, if you would install a new version of Piraņa, or move your model folder to another place, your notes will not be lost. The database file contains also some other information about the run results (OFV, run success, etc.) and can of course be read out manually as well, using sqlite3.
When I open a csv file in Excel from Pirana (and in general), I get the error message that the
file is recognized as a SLYK-type file, and therefore cannot open the file.
This is due to the fact that the first column in your dataset is named
"ID". Renaming the column (e.g. 'id') or inserting a column before it
will solve the problem. When converting and opening table files, the "ID" column is
automatically converted to "id" by Pirana to avoid these issues.
How long will it take me to install the Piraņa Cluster at my site?
After reading the manual, the cluster should be up and running within an hour.
Can the PCluster take advantage of multi-core CPUs?
Yes. Although this has only been tested on dual-core CPUs, NONMEM runs are automatically distributed and (limited to) one CPU. How to specify the number of CPU of a node in the cluster is detailed in the manual.
On the Pirana site it states that PSPad supports NONMEM syntax highlighting but I can't find how to get PSPad to highlight NONMEM syntax. How is this done?
PSPad is a free code editor that supports user supplied syntax highlighting. It has a lot of built-in syntaxes (perl / C++ / Java etc.) but the nice thing is that you can also create your own, which I did for NONMEM (not included it in the Piraņa distribution, but available here). Drop this file in the directory c:\program files\PSPad Editor\syntax (or where PSPad is installed), and in PSPad choose 'Settings -> Highlighter settings'. In the dialog, scroll down the syntax list to unassigned places. Select the first one and assign `NONMEM' from the user syntaxes from the listbox on the right, to this place. You can apply file masks to the syntax (default are .ctl and .mod, but you can add your own), so that if you load a control stream, the NONMEM syntax is automatically chosen. In the tab 'Colors', you can specify you own colors if you don't like my palet... Click 'Apply' and 'OK'.
Note: The syntax definition file is not complete, I included the words that I use the most. You can add words to the file from within PSPad, from "Settings -> User Highlighting", nonmem.ini.
Note: Another great code-highlighting editor for Windows is ConTEXT.
Note: From Pirana version 2.0.0, a modelfile editor with some basic syntax highlighting is built-in.
Versions for Linux / Mac OSX?
Working on it. Expected end of 2009.
Update: Cross platform version is available from november 2009. (version 2.2.0)
Questions or comments are appreciated at the mailinglist (send a mail to pirana-users@lists.sourceforge.net).
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