Hi Frank, Ian, Everyone

Yes, I meant doing this via Simfactory. But at the same time I acknowledge the fact that it could as well be doable via some Cactus parameter... On that note, we have tried changing the parameter in the top-level SIMFACTORY directory under the job directory. However, looking at the parfile in the new checkpoint directory, it still bore the old value. We even went as far as changing the parameter in all parfiles in the previous checkpoint subdirectory, in addition to changing it in the top-level SIMFACTORY directory.

In any case, if you also suggest that then I'm going to give this a try again over the weekend (or on Monday - our computing center is on a shut down for the weekend).

Thank you
Dumsani

On 30/09/2016 17:57, Ian Hinder wrote:

On 30 Sep 2016, at 17:47, Frank Loeffler <knarf@cct.lsu.edu> wrote:

On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 05:40:50PM +0200, Ian Hinder wrote:
When you run the simulation again, you give it a new parameter file.  It is this new parameter file which is checked for steered parameters; Cactus doesn't look at the output from a previous run.  Many parameters can be steered on recovery in this manner, by changing them in the parameter file.  Be careful when steering the out_every parameters; you almost certainly want out_criterion = divisor, not the default of "iteration".  "iteration" outputs if the current iteration number is N greater than the last output iteration.  "divisor" outputs if the current iteration is divisible by N.

I assume Dumsani refers to simfactory. How do you change the parameter file that simfactory tells Cactus to use for a restart? I admit that in that case I usually go in and change the file in the output directory (simulations/name/...), but there must be a better way. I didn't have to do that so often, so I never bothers to find out myself.

Does simfactory actually observe a --parfile option on submission of a restart? It probably will not complain if you try, but does it actually do what you want?

That I do not know. It would be nice if it did.  What I usually do is change the top-level SIMFACTORY/par/*.par file.  I don't think simfactory reads anything from restarts; it only reads from the top-level SIMFACTORY directory when creating a new restart.