Checkpoints and restart

[Tissot11]

Hello,

I have a question regarding the checkpoints and restarts.

1. Is it possible to limit the number of checkpoints to 2? At the moment, the file size of checkpoints is quite large.
2. Since checkpoints work only for Full diagnostics, what is the best way to deal with a Reduced diagnostic? If I restart the simulation from a checkpoint in the same folder, would the Reduced diagnostics be overwritten or appended with the new values?

[ax3l]

Hi @Tissot11,

Thanks for your question!

For 1. we do not have the functionality to automatically remove all but the last checkpoints in WarpX itself. But you can set up a cron-job or parallel watch job or script on your system, that monitors the WarpX output and removes older checkpoints as new ones are completed.

For 2:

Since checkpoints work only for Full diagnostics, what is the best way to deal with a Reduced diagnostic?

This is just unfortunate naming. Our checkpoints are implemented similar to our "Full" diagnostics - but they checkpoint every state of the simulation.

If I restart the simulation from a checkpoint in the same folder, would the Reduced diagnostics be overwritten or appended with the new values?

Our reduced diagnostics tries to append with new values when it encounters amr.restart in an inputs file. (see: Source/Diagnostics/ReducedDiags/ReducedDiags.cpp:43-64 and ReducedDiags::WriteToFile in ReducedDiags.cpp:132 that opens the file with std::ofstream::app)