Hi Joe,
> The only OS-level routine needed is RENAME(), assuming that intrinsic
> INQUIRE commands work as they should. I only suggest it because I
> already have code to do it. The usefulness of renaming depends on how
> often regular AMBER users accidentally overwrite files.
>
> I think the automatic LUN allocation is always useful for large
> projects, and is easy to implement with INQUIRE opened=, which is
> already used by 'sander/ncsu-utils.f'. It could be built in to the
> existing amopen(), where lun is assigned a value if called with lun=-1.
I'm not sure we need to protect users from accidentally overwriting their
files. That can be a good life lesson occasionally even for long time AMBER
users. However, one thing that Tom C, Carlos and I were discussing where
this might be useful was the saving of two restart files. Sometimes,
especially when running on the supercomputers a node can crash while sander
/ pmemd is writing a restart file. This results in the restart file getting
corrupted and you need to restart this entire run rather than being able to
continue from where it left off.
Hence we think it would be a good idea if sander / pmemd kept at least the
last restart file each time. At present you can set ntwr to a -ve number and
it will keep all restart files but this is not really practical when running
100+ ns runs on big machines. Thus it would be useful to have the behavior
changed (in case of a positive ntwr value) such that when sander / pmemd
write a restart file they take the existing restart file (if it exists) and
rename it with a .bak extension. Then they write the new restart file to the
filename specified by -r on the command line. The process then repeats at
the next restart write overwriting the old .bak file and replacing it with
the current one.
What you suggest might be a good way to address this assuming it is portable
across all machine types - although it might be slightly overcomplicated for
what we need here. I think just a single restart + .bak is suitable to fix
the majority of crash issues. The key is to do it in a way that doesn't hurt
performance - I.e. copying the current restart file to .bak then overwriting
the .rst file is probably safest in terms of recovering from a crash with an
intact restart file but is not good for performance. Renaming may be very
fast and in the noise and is probably good enough to avoid corrupting the
restart file if it crashes while that is happening.
Just my 3c...
Comments?
All the best
Ross
/\
\/
|\oss Walker
| Assistant Research Professor |
| San Diego Supercomputer Center |
| Tel: +1 858 822 0854 | EMail:- ross.rosswalker.co.uk |
|
http://www.rosswalker.co.uk | PGP Key available on request |
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Received on Sun Mar 08 2009 - 01:09:52 PST
