[mpas-developers] MPAS Restart I/O

[Conrad Roesch]

Hello Everyone,

We have made a modification to the restart file I/O for the 
atmospheric cores, and I am wondering how you want to proceed with 
regards to merging these changes back into the trunk.

In the trunk version of the code, multiple restart frames are written 
to a single file, whereas in the atmospheric branch we are writing a 
single frame per restart file, with the filenames differentiated by 
the date/time of the restart frame (for example, if the user specified 
the name "restart.nc" we would write out 
"restart.2011-01-01_12:00:00.nc", "restart.2011-01-02_12:00:00.nc", 
etc).   Our reason for making this change was to avoid some problems 
with overwriting restart frames during subsequent runs and to make the 
available restart options more obvious to the user.  This format will 
naturally make the restart time explicit- that is, it is now 
reasonable to expect the users to specify in the namelist a restart 
time that corresponds precisely to one that is available, and 
therefore in the atmospheric cores we now throw an error for 
non-matching restart times rather than try to interpret them by 
searching for a close available time.

If you are interested in making this the standard way to do restarts 
for the ocean core as well, the changes are straightforward and I 
would be happy to make them.  However, if you would prefer to continue 
writing all restart frames to a single file, I can make the framework 
modifications necessary to continue supporting that method the ocean 
core while employing the one-frame-per-file method for the atmospheric 
cores.

Cheers,
Conrad