[mpas-developers] proposing a few infrastructure changes

[Michael Duda]

Hi, All.

We're hoping to merge the non-hydrostatic atmosphere core into the
repository trunk in the very near future, and to pave the way for
that merge, I'd like to incorporate some of the infrastructure
enhancements that I've made in the atmos_physics branch into the
trunk in advance. These enhancements don't have any impact on the
existing cores in the trunk, in the sense that, if the cores don't
make use of them, the changes are invisible to the cores. In
summary (in other words, just copying and pasting from the svn
log), the changes include:

* Add changes to I/O and registry infrastructure to support
  periodic input on a separate stream.

* Add changes to registry and I/O modules so that nVertLevelsP1 is
  treated as just another non-decomposed dimension, rather than as a
  special case.  These changes allow us to dimension a variable with
  nVertLevelsP1 as the outer-most dimension.

* Changes to allow registry-defined fields to have a
  non-decomposed dimension as their outer-most dimension, i.e., to
  have a dimension other than nCells, nEdges, nVertices, or
  nVertLevels outer-most.

* Add I/O support for time-varying, 1d integer fields.

* Create a version of the quicksort routine to work with real
  values, and create generic interface for the quicksort routine
  that can select between sorting real and integer values

The affected files are:

M       src/registry/registry_types.h
M       src/registry/gen_inc.c
M       src/registry/parse.c
M       src/framework/module_io_input.F
M       src/framework/module_sort.F
M       src/framework/module_io_output.F
M       src/framework/module_grid_types.F

For review, I've placed a working copy of the trunk that includes
the proposed changes at
http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/people/duda/files/trunk_mgd_20110914.tar.gz

If the changes look acceptable to everyone, I'll go ahead and
commit them to the trunk; otherwise, any thoughts or comments
would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Michael