#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.