Analyzing SPARTA output¶

While SPARTA is running, it produces Console output that one should at least partially understand before using the outputs of SPARTA.

A SPARTA run produces a single HDF5 output file. The contents of this file are documented in The SPARTA HDF5 output format, and depend on the chosen Results & Analyses as well as the compile-time output settings (see Compiling SPARTA as well as the documentation about the different sub-modules).

The HDF5 file can be read using any HDF5 utility, but in practice matching the different datasets can be tedious. Thus, SPARTA comes with a much more convenient Python analysis package that reads a SPARTA file and translates the selected data into python dictionaries. This utility is the recommended way to read SPARTA files.

However, in many cases, the desired output is not the SPARTA file itself but an augmented halo catalog that can be created with the MORIA extension (see Creating halo catalogs with MORIA).

Regardless of how the SPARTA and/or MORIA files are read and analyzed, they use the common set of abbreviations for tracers, results, and analyses:

Type	Incarnation	Long name	Abbreviation
Tracer		`tracer`	`tcr`
Tracer	Particles	`particles`	`ptl`
Tracer	Subhalos	`subhalos`	`sho`
Result		`result`	`res`
Result	Infall	`infall`	`ifl`
Result	Splashsback	`splashback`	`sbk`
Result	Trajectory	`trajectory`	`tjy`
Result	OrbitCount	`orbitcount`	`oct`
Analysis		`analysis`	`anl`
Analysis	SplashbackRadius	`rsp`	`rsp`
Analysis	DensityProfiles	`profiles`	`prf`
Analysis	HaloProperties	`haloprops`	`hps`

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