[aspect-devel] Error in moving temporary files during output

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

All:
I'm running this big computation and I'm getting these errors:

***** ERROR: could not move /tmp/tmp.gDzuQS to 
output/solution-00001.0007.vtu *****
***** ERROR: could not move /tmp/tmp.OocqGa to 
output/solution-00001.0016.vtu *****
***** ERROR: could not move /tmp/tmp.andgJD to 
output/solution-00002.0067.vtu *****
***** ERROR: could not move /tmp/tmp.PfZ5om to 
output/solution-00003.0121.vtu *****
***** ERROR: could not move /tmp/tmp.0oYfnq to 
output/solution-00003.0076.vtu *****

(so far, 65 of these errors on ~2200 time steps on 128 processors). 
These errors are produced in a piece of code in visualization.cc where 
we first try to write data into a temporary file under /tmp and then 
move it to its final location, in hopes that this is something the file 
system services can do in the background.

Getting this error message is awkward since it now means that I have a 
bunch of time steps for which I don't have complete output files. Would 
anyone want to venture a guess what could cause this situation? And, 
more proactively: What should we do in such situations? Simply retry the 
operation? If it fails, just output the data into the final file, rather 
than trying to write it into /tmp and then move? It seems like a 
situation where we could, without too much difficulty, deal with the 
exceptional case and do the right thing anyway...

Best
  W.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolfgang Bangerth               email:            bangerth at math.tamu.edu
                                 www: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~bangerth/