On 5 Feb 2014, at 17:47, Vassilios Mewes <vassilios.mewes@uv.es> wrote:

Hello Roland and Erik,

thanks for your replies...

what do you mean by writing different segments in the same directory? I thought i was creating a new simulation for every run I do and then simply changing the output directory to a data directory in the Simulations folder where the respective simulation resides...is that the wrong way of thinking about it?
maybe i am over complicating things as well...i just realised that the simfactory is using the parfile inside the simulation_name folder, so i guess outputting to "../../data" will get me to the right directory..

A "simulation", as far as simfactory is concerned, is a directory, which might be in /scratch/username/simulations.  This usually corresponds to a single parameter file, and is logically "one cactus run".  However, because jobs on clusters usually are limited to 24 hours, you need multiple jobs to form a longer simulation.  SimFactory calls these different segments of the simulation "restarts", as the second one is restarted from the first, etc.  The restarts correspond to directories output-NNNN in the simulation directory.  Each new Cactus job in the simulation is run inside this output-NNNN directory.  The parameter file usually specifies the name of the directory to put data into.  Some users use '$parfile' which names the output directory after the parameter file.  

I usually name the simulation after the parameter file, and output the data into a directory also named after the parameter file, so my data would go in

/scratch/username/simulations/bbh/output-NNNN/bbh/phi.x.asc

for a simulation called bbh, and an output file called phi.x.asc.

Does this make things clearer?



best wishes,

Vassili



On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 5:27 PM, Erik Schnetter <schnetter@cct.lsu.edu> wrote:
On Feb 5, 2014, at 11:19 , Roland Haas <rhaas@tapir.caltech.edu> wrote:

> Signed PGP part
> Hello Vassili,
>
> > sorry to keep bothering you...
> No problem. Sorry for the delayed reply, I had not seen your second
> question in the email.
>
> > I tried around getting the output folder to be in the
> > simulation_name/SIMFACTORY/data folder, but couldn't figure it
> > out..its not terribly important, but would be nice to write the
> > data to that folder..
> >
> > any ideas?
> Sorry, I have no idea how to change the output directory. I suspect
> that the output-0000 names are hard-coded into simfactory. In
> particular I do not think it is possible (nor advisable) to accumulate
> output from different segments in the same directory.

Vassili

I recommend against outputting several segments into the same directory. This seems convenient at first, but can completely destroy existing output if you e.g. run out of disk space. In particular, if an HDF5 file is opened for appending, it becomes unreadable until it has been properly closed, and running out of disk space prevents this.

If you want to do so anyway, then you would use an output directory "../data" or so. The path ".." gets you out of the output-NNNN directory.

I also would not use the SIMFACTORY directory; this directory contains internal data for Simfactory, and is used to hide these data. I would use e.g. simulation_name/data instead.

-erik

--
Erik Schnetter <schnetter@cct.lsu.edu>
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/eschnetter/

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