On Feb 5, 2014, at 12:16 , Vassilios Mewes vassilios.mewes@uv.es wrote:
On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 6:02 PM, Ian Hinder ian.hinder@aei.mpg.de wrote:
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?
yes, thanks for the explanation!
So in that case, you would set
IO::out_dir = bbh IO::checkpoint_dir = bbh and IO::recover_dir = bbh ??
Yes. Actually, you can write
IO::out_dir = $parfile
instead, so that you don't need to change these lines when you change the file name.
And another question about the restarts of the entire simulation: Do I need to use the TerminationTrigger thorn for that and set the walltime I have on the cluster (minus some time to do the checkpointing before the termination)
That is one way. Actually, you can set TerminationTrigger::on_remaining_walltime = 20 to trigger termination when you have 20 minutes left. Simfactory will automatically fill in the correct value for TerminationTrigger::max_walltime if you set this parameter (to any value) in your parameter file.
sorry for all the stupid questions, but this is the first time I will actually have to use the simfactory!
I hope it simplifies things!
-erik