Quick Start¶

This guide will help you run your first gwmock simulation in just a few minutes.

1. Run Your First Simulation¶

Run the following command in your working directory:

# Copy quick-start configuration file to working directory
gwmock config --get noise/uncorrelated_gaussian/quick_start --output quick_start_config.yaml

# Run simulation
gwmock simulate quick_start_config.yaml

The configuration file quick_start_config.yaml runs the full orchestration pipeline — population sampling, CBC signal injection, and noise generation — producing a 1024-second dataset for the ET Sardinia configuration.

It requires an internet connection to fetch the BBH population file from GitHub.

You should see output like:

INFO Config mode: quick_start_config.yaml
INFO Configuration loaded and validated
INFO Created simulation plan with 1 batches
INFO Simulation plan validation passed
INFO Executing simulation plan: 1 batches
INFO Executing 1 simulators
Executing simulation plan:   0%|                                        | 0/1
Executing simulation plan: 100%|████████████████████████████████████████| 1/1
INFO Simulation completed successfully. Output written to output

2. Check the Output¶

Your working directory will contain:

output/
├── noise/
│   ├── E-ET1_SARD_STRAIN_NOISE-1577491218-1024.gwf
│   ├── E-ET2_SARD_STRAIN_NOISE-1577491218-1024.gwf
│   └── E-ET3_SARD_STRAIN_NOISE-1577491218-1024.gwf
└── signal/
    ├── E-ET1_SARD_STRAIN_BBH-1577491218-1024.gwf
    ├── E-ET2_SARD_STRAIN_BBH-1577491218-1024.gwf
    └── E-ET3_SARD_STRAIN_BBH-1577491218-1024.gwf
metadata/
├── index.yaml
└── orchestration-0.metadata.json
resource_usage_summary.json

The ET-Triangle-Sardinia network alias expands to its three interferometers (ET1_SARD, ET2_SARD, ET3_SARD), so one frame file per interferometer is written for both noise and signal.

Data Files¶

output/noise/ contains the simulated Gaussian noise strain. output/signal/ contains the injected CBC signal strain. To produce a realistic data stream, merge the two using GWpy (see Reading Data).

Metadata File¶

The .metadata.json file records the exact configuration, seeds, and package versions needed to reproduce this run. For details on the schema and how to reuse metadata files, see the Metadata Files and Reproducibility pages.

3. Explore Different Simulators¶

To run any gwmock simulations, you only need to provide a .yaml configuration file. A collection of ready-to-use configuration files is available in the gwmock/examples directory. You can use them directly or adapt them to suit your needs.

• For an overview of all available examples, see the Examples page.
• For a more complete and user-friendly guide to writing your own configuration files, see the Configuration Files page.

4. Next Steps¶

• Generating Data - Quick guide for generating datasets with gwmock, including Einstein Telescope (ET) examples.
• Examples - Example configuration files for ET simulations.
• Request New Features - How to request new features or improvements.