[Swift-devel] Multiple output files

[Michael Wilde]

Hi Jonathan,

You are thinking about this exactly right, and have (quickly) hit one of 
our programmability weaknesses.

At the moment, there is no good way to do this. We have had much 
discussion on it, though, and plan to create such "collect files of this 
pattern into an array" semantics.

What we do for now is one of these two work-arounds:

- write a single tarfile as output (in a wrapper script for the app, 
which tars files of the appropriate pattern, like "*.simout"

- write the files directly to a specific (shared) directory instead of 
the Swift "app task directory" (called "job directory" in the current 
User Guide.  Then return a single file with a list of these file names, 
and map that using an array_mapper if the results need to be passed to a 
next stage

We should see if we can get a prototype of such a feature to you in 
short order. But hopefully just to get things working, one of the above 
methods will suffice for you, for now.

Im cc'ing swift-devel to see what we can do.

Thanks for reminding us of this fairly common need!

- Mike

On 3/19/14, 5:57 PM, Jonathan Ozik wrote:
> Mike,
>
> Perhaps I'm not thinking about this correctly, but I'm trying to figure out how to collect output files that are generated by a simulation run. The scenario is that the Repast executable is run and, after it is run, there are files that are output into some location. There can be an arbitrary number of such output files per simulation run but, if necessary, it would be possible to pre-specify which files to look for. Is there a simple way to indicate to swift that it should collect all the files matching a particular pattern within a directory? It looks like the mappers might work here but as far as I understand the mappers are defined prior to calls to executables. Again, I might just not be thinking about this in a "swift" enough way.
>
> Jonathan
>

-- 
Michael Wilde
Mathematics and Computer Science          Computation Institute
Argonne National Laboratory               The University of Chicago