[aspect-devel] Progress in writing the mantle convection code Aspect

[Eric Heien]

>> Even if this is how it works (or will work), I’m not sure this is a
>> good idea for serializing particles because there can potentially be
>> many more particles than will fit on a single node.  It seems it
>> would be better to use parallel MPI I/O for all processes to write
>> directly to the file.
> 
> Good point. I will add a section to the manual's discussion of postprocessor implementations about this. What I'll write is this:
> - every processor asks its postprocessors to serialize their data
> - but only processor 0 actually writes it out
> - upon restart, every processor reads the checkpoint file
> - every processor asks its postprocessors to restore their data
>  from what processor 0 had originally written

Is this correct?  From what I can tell (checkpoint_restart.cc:94) only process 0 calls the postprocessor serialization function.  This complicates things a bit for particle checkpointing since I need all processes to write to the file.  Is there a way to have process 0 write to the file and have the rest of the processes create an aspect::oarchive that goes to /dev/null, while ensuring everyone gets their serialization functions called?

-Eric