[MITgcm-devel] convenience features for the adjoint

[Martin Losch]

Dear adjoint community,

currently I am debugging a configuration with adjoint, and for this I'd like to have two features that would greatly faciliate my work, if you'd like to have them, too, I'd implement them in a more general way, otherwise I'll keep this to myself:

1. have an even more flexible way to turn off packages in "admode". The usual candiates for this are KPP, GM, seaice, so I'd define variables like useKPPinADmode and set them in a name list file (data.pkg?). This requires that this namelist is present in all adjoint runs, which may be a little inconvenient if you do not want to use this feature. I could include an extra CPP flag that removes reading the new namelist.

2. have adread/adwrite write to directories that I can specify at run time. In general global file systems are slow (to slow for adjoint), local ones are faster, but the directories local to "compute nodes" often vanish after a run is complete (at least our system is configured in this way). When a run crashes (or runs out of CPU time) everything is lost, that was in these directories. So I'd like mitgcmuv_ad write "normal" output (STDOUT, diagnostics-pkgs, monitor, etc) to my global file system, but have adread/write to the local files systems that usually have names that are unknown prior to the run (e.g. $PBS_TMPDIR in my case). I plan to put the value of $PBS_TMPDIR into a name list (data?, data.ctrl?, not sure, probably data) that is then read by the model. Problem: this interferes with mdsioLocalDir, that sets the directory for all I/O, so I'd have to turn the proposed new feature off, if mdsioLocalDir is not empty.

Should/Can I implement that for "everybody"?

Martin