[petsc-dev] Writing rich state

[Matthew Knepley]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 9:09 AM, Jed Brown <jed at 59a2.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:31:32 -0600, Dmitry Karpeev <karpeev at mcs.anl.gov>
> wrote:
> > Yes, I think SQL or some such approach would be a good solution.
> > I don't even think the actual file format matters too much: we can just
> > create collections of files that share keys.  The database is needed only
> > to manage file names.  It could also store other data, of course, but
> > that's just gravy.
>
> I think the database needs to hold a nontrivial amount of semantic
> information.  For example, suppose we have a DMComposite covering
> multiple domains, with some domains having more than one DM on the same
> mesh (as in mixed FEM).  These DMs will share coordinate DMs and the
> associated position vectors (which may be time-dependent).  Other
> metadata, such as precision, endianness, units, scaling factors, time,
> and projections, would (in my opinion) also go in the database so that
> everything can be wired up without opening these files, and they can be
> slurped in with a single collective read.


Yes, we had to add all this to PyLith to get things to make sense. We should
try and get a list together. I can start with what PyLith has.

  Matt


> > Yes, labels are cumbersome, since they have to be create manually, etc.
> > However, when we decide where on the filesystem to place a file, we are
> > essentially selecting its labels: the directories on the path.  At least
> those
> > are *some* of the labels we'd like to attach to the file and the
> filesystem only
> > allows "labels" encoded as directories.  I agree that it would be nice to
> allow
> > more general queries, but based on what (permissions, timestamp? those
> > sound like natural candidates)?
>
> I wasn't thinking of filesystem metadata at all, it's the user-visible
> attributes and relationship among objects in the simulation that are
> significant.  We have to drop the files somewhere and give them a name,
> but I'd be happy if they were just named by SHA1.  The name has no
> significance since you can't do anything with it without the semantic
> information in the database.
>
> Jed
>



-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments
is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments
lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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