Log file Time Stamps in Windows Under Cygwin

If you run your QuantumATKATK calculations under Cygwin on Windows, you may notice that the time stamps of the start/end do not match the actual time on your computer. This is a known issue/bug in Python on Windows, which is outside our control, but it can look a bit weird:

$ date Tue, Aug 22, 2017 13:14:38
$ atkpython gold.py
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Atomistix ToolKit 2017.0 [Build 15d690eb18]                                  |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| DFT Calculation  [Started Tue Aug 22 21:14:41 2017]                          |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

If this bothers you, a work-around is to unset the environment variable TZ:

$ date Tue, Aug 22, 2017 13:15:38
$ unset TZ
$ atkpython gold.py
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Atomistix ToolKit 2017.0 [Build 15d690eb18]                                  |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| DFT Calculation  [Started Tue Aug 22 13:15:41 2017]                          |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

You can also do this for just the QuantumATK run, by running atkpython like

$ TZ= atkpython gold.py

The issue is not present on Linux, and also not if you run QuantumATK from the Job Manager in NanoLab or via the “cmd” command line.