[Users] Enhancements to Multipole

[Frank Loeffler]

On Thu, Dec 09, 2010 at 04:43:53PM +0100, Ian Hinder wrote:
> > Do you think that most people would actually use the hdf5 version?
> 
> I expect that people have very high inertia.  However, on production filesystems, having a large number of output files is frowned upon, and makes things quite slow, so I would encourage people to use HDF5 output whenever possible.

That is why I asked. I would expect most people to use the hdf5 version
now.

> I think this would be surprising to some people.  Imagine that you were happily using ASCII output in Multipole, and one day decided to include the HDF5 thorn in your thornlist because of something completely unrelated.  The next time you ran, you would find that there was no ASCII output for Multipole, and all your analysis scripts would not be able to deal with the HDF5 data.  I would adhere to the principle of least surprise.

I agree that this could happen. What about if the thorn would provide a
utility (script) which uses h5dump to create the ascii-output from the
hdf5 one?

> If we want to encourage people to use HDF5 output, we could enable HDF5 by default, but I would not like to disable ASCII by default just yet.  I don't want to enable HDF5 by default just yet, as I don't know what the performance impact of it will be.  Especially on clusters with slow filesystems (I'm looking at you, Kraken).  We could enable it by default after it has seen some more testing.

Yes, we could do that. However, production runs wouldn't all see the new
version right now anyway (most of them will probably use the released
version, right).

Frank

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