When you run tablix2, you actually start the master process that will start the requested number (-n option) of slave processes (Tablix kernels) on the virtual machine. It will then multicast the configuration file to all the computing nodes and start listening for their reports.
Tablix isn't very verbose by default. You can enable additional informative and debug messages with the -d Noption, where N is an integer from 0 (only fatal error messages are shown) to 4 (display debug messages). Default is 2.
Following is an explanation of the progress indicator that is shown at verbosity settings greater than 1:
[4000b] reports 87271 (0) at 1, 480.0 GPM, 00:00:05 elapsed, 4/4 running ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ | | | | | | _____________| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |_ Number of running | | | | | | nodes / number of | | | | | | nodes in the cluster. | | | | | | | | | | | | Node stops when it finds | | | | | | an acceptable solution. | | | | | | | | | | | |_ Elapsed time since Tablix | | | | | was started. | | | | | | | | | |_ Total generations per minute count for | | | | the cluster. | | | | | | | |_ Population serial number | | | | | |_ 0 means that an acceptable solution was not found | | in the population. 1 means the population contains | | an acceptable solution. | | | | This must be one for at least 300 | | generations for Tablix to stop. | | | |_ Weighted sum of all errors | |_ PVM Task ID of the node that sent the last report.
You can press Ctrl-C (or send SIGINT) to stop the process. Tablix will save its state in a number of files called save0.txt, save1.txt, etc. (it will prepend your prefix, if given). You can later resume the process by running Tablix with the -r parameter. You should not change the XML configuration file in any way between stopping and restoring a Tablix computation. You may however change the number of computing nodes.
When all the criteria for an acceptable solution are satisfied, Tablix will output one XML file for each node (file name will be prefix + result0.xml, result1.xml, etc.). These files can then be processed with tablix2_output to produce a timetable in a format suitable for further processing or display.
During the computation, Tablix saves the progress of the computation in files named conv0.txt, conv1.txt, etc. (unless you compiled Tablix with convergence information saving disable (--disable-conv ./configure parameter). You can plot this data using tablix2_plot script. See the man page for more information.