#26 cdd to contain a sim spec

[Ed Spittles]

Hi Trevor
This is a tentative proposal.

Thinking about the purpose of the rank command, which is to discover an efficient and ordered set of simulations, I find that I have to perform a non-trivial operation after running rank, to get a mapping from the cdd files in their various locations to the corresponding simulation invocations.

I could make my life a bit easier by storing a simulation invocation command in a well-known file adjacent to the cdd.

But I wondered if it would be a useful enhancement to be able to store at least a line of text in the cdd files at the time of scoring, to capture the simulation invocation. Then the rank command could have an option to output the text from each cdd instead of the cdd name.

A simulation invocation would, I think, be a single (long) line, suitable to be piped into a shell, appended to a script or sent into a job submission queue. The content would be whatever it takes to fully specify a simulation: a directory, input files, mode selections, timeouts etc.

I'm thinking covered doesn't need to know anything about these stored invocations, it just needs to preserve them.

Does that sound useful to you? It would also take some extra documentation effort I suppose.

Cheers
Ed

[Trevor Williams]

Ed,

The score command has an option currently that should allow you to do exactly what you want. The -m option allows the user to specify any user message (in this case the simulation invocation) that will be stored as is in the CDD file. I don't believe that I have currently built much into the retrieval of this data, but it can be viewed in the CDD file (it will be towards the top of the file, preceeded by an integer number).

Give this option a try and let me know if it suits your needs. Also add to this feature request if you can figure out good places to output this information. I cannot other than to create a CDD query-like command (which doesn't exist and probably wouldn't do much else besides output the user message information...).

Thanks,
Trevor

[Ed Spittles]

Hi Trevor
that sounds promising: if the rank command could have an option
-output-m-records-file=filename
or similar, then I could get the set of simulation invocations for the selected set - so long as I put them in place during the score invocations, which should be straightforward.

In the meantime, I could adopt this flow and use awk to pull out record type 11.

sorry I missed (or forgot) the -m option

Ed