[Developers] Steering checkpointing by wall time

[Erik Schnetter]

0 is not a legal value.  We could make it legal, and then it would  
mean to checkpoint as often as possible.

I prefer -1 for this out-of-band value, since it is immediately clear  
that -1 does something special.  It is not as clear that 0 has a  
special meaning.

On another note, using minutes as unit becomes impractical if the time  
span becomes of the order of days.  People don't know offhand how many  
minutes there are in a day.

-erik

On May 7, 2008, at 15:32:06, Allen Gabrielle wrote:

> What happens if you checkpoint every 0 hours? (That is, can we remove
> the -1 option
> to disable checkpointing if choosing 0 does this).
>
> On May 7, 2008, at 2:38 PM, Ian Hinder wrote:
>
>> Erik Schnetter wrote:
>>> I suggest to add a new parameter to CactusBase/IOUtil which
>>> checkpoints every so many wall clock hours.  This is often more
>>> convenient than choosing the checkpointing interval by iterations.
>>
>> This is a good idea.  Should it be hours, or minutes or seconds?  I
>> think the termination condition is done in minutes, which seems
>> reasonable to me.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> -erik
>>>
>>> Index: param.ccl
>>> ===================================================================
>>> RCS file: /cactusdevcvs/CactusBase/IOUtil/param.ccl,v
>>> retrieving revision 1.51
>>> diff -u -r1.51 param.ccl
>>> --- param.ccl	18 Apr 2007 16:00:12 -0000	1.51
>>> +++ param.ccl	7 May 2008 18:50:15 -0000
>>> @@ -142,6 +143,11 @@
>>>    1:* :: "Every so many iterations"
>>>   -1:0 :: "Disable periodic checkpointing"
>>> } -1
>>> +REAL checkpoint_every_walltime_hours "How often to checkpoint"
>>> STEERABLE = ALWAYS
>>> +{
>>> +  (0:* :: "After so much walltime has passed"
>>> +  -1   :: "Disable periodic walltime checkpointing"
>>> +} -1
>>> BOOLEAN checkpoint_on_terminate "Checkpoint after last iteration"
>>> STEERABLE = ALWAYS
>>> {
>>> } "no"
>>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Ian Hinder
>> hinder at gravity.psu.edu
>> http://www.gravity.psu.edu/~hinder
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>
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-- 
Erik Schnetter <schnetter at cct.lsu.edu>   http://www.cct.lsu.edu/~eschnett/

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