#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 hinder):
I agree - I like this abstraction and it would be good to keep it. Maybe a good interface would be a new option "--continue" to the create command:
sim create --continue [--parfile <parfile>] [--config <config>] <simname>
The high-level view would be that there is an existing simulation which needs to be "continued" in a new simulation. The implementation would be that the checkpoint files of the old simulation are hard-linked into the new simulation. At the same time, a new parameter file can be provided to do parameter steering.
One issue with this is that users will want to treat the resulting "combination" of simulations as a single physics run. Does this mean that analysis tools must now handle not only the case of data chunked into restarts, but also of collections of simulations corresponding to different parameter choices? When steering can be done within a simulation, this extra level of complication in analysis tools is not needed.
If the new simulation contains a pointer to the simulation it was continued from, analysis tools can be given the last simulation in the sequence and work their way back to get the entire physics run.