#1890: formaline capture simfactory information ---------------------------------------------+------------------------------ Reporter: jonah.maxwell.miller@… | Owner: eschnett Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: unset | Milestone: Component: Other | Version: development version Resolution: | Keywords: formaline ---------------------------------------------+------------------------------
Comment (by eschnett):
Formaline is not just about storing the source code. Formaline is about making simulations reproducible, and that includes capturing all parameters (and parameter changes) at run time, and recording the simulation environment (machine, user, directory, time, various UUIDs, etc.), and also putting part of that information automatically into various places (ASCII and HDF5 output, unless disabled).
I don't know whether Formaline records the number of MPI processes (probably yes) and the number of OpenMP threads (probably no), but it should record both, as well as the job id from the queuing system. It would be trivial to record the MDB entry that Simfactory used to create a simulation, and thus it should be done. "Recording" doesn't mean that it should be in one of the directories -- "recording" means that Formaline puts this information into all the output channels where recorded information is available. These are currently (mostly) a human-readable text file and a json file, as well as a database server if one is configured (it typically isn't, unfortunately). ((We should revisit this -- people find it quite easy to set up a private git repository, so we should go this route if it makes people use it.)) This information is also available at run time, if there is e.g. a web server or a log server running as a thorn. It should probably also go, in its entirety, into large output files.