[ET Trac] [Einstein Toolkit] #487: SimFactory should allow steering of parameters between restarts

[Einstein Toolkit]

#487: SimFactory should allow steering of parameters between restarts
--------------------------+-------------------------------------------------
  Reporter:  hinder       |       Owner:  eschnett
      Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new     
  Priority:  major        |   Milestone:          
 Component:  SimFactory   |     Version:          
Resolution:               |    Keywords:          
--------------------------+-------------------------------------------------

Comment (by eschnett):

 It seems the Real World (TM) interferes with my idealised vision of it.
 Well, that happened before.

 The "submit" command is the wrong place to change the parameter file; job
 submission is only supposed to handle technical details, such as job
 queues, node counts, thread counts, etc. All the physics is supposed to be
 handled elsewhere.

 The current "create" command creates a simulation, which is then assumed
 to remain unmodified. I suggest to add a new command "modify" (or with a
 similar name) which modifies a simulation, i.e. replaces an executable
 (with submit/run scripts), parameter file, etc. In this way, modifying a
 simulation is independent of submitting a new job; in practice, one may
 often want to do them at the same time, but these are really separate
 steps.

 There should then also be a "modify-submit" command, or (maybe better) the
 "create" and "modify" commands should submit automatically, unless an
 option "--no-submit" is given.

 Bruno, Roland, would this work for you?

 A point about "hacking simfactory's internals": Simfactory stores the
 executable and parameter file when creating a simulation, in
 subdirectories called "exe" and "par", so that they are easy to find.
 These are used when a new restart is submitted. You can modify them at any
 time; simfactory makes copies for every restart, so that there will still
 be a full, self-consistent description of previous (and currently queued)
 restarts. In fact, modifying this parameter file may be better than
 specifying a new one, since specifying a new one would require you to keep
 (elsewhere, outside simfactory) a copy of the parameter file -- which
 should not be necessary, since simfactory already reliably keeps such a
 copy.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.einsteintoolkit.org/ticket/487#comment:5>
Einstein Toolkit <http://einsteintoolkit.org>
The Einstein Toolkit