[Mesa-users] Disabling eos, kap, etc. caching

[Warrick Ball]

Oops, spoke to soon!  Looks like we (students and I) should be able to use
`/var/tmp`.  That'll probably solve this particular problem.

W

------------
Warrick Ball
Postdoc, School of Physics and Astronomy
University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT
W.H.Ball at bham.ac.uk
+44 (0)121 414 4552


On Thu, 7 Feb 2019, Warrick Ball wrote:

> Hi Aaron,
>
> Sadly, I'm not the administrator and I don't know of any scratch hard drive 
> space that I could use.  Even if they could all read from another user's 
> cache, that one user would still have this issue.  And I'm also not sure 
> that's even possible because of how the different filesystems with user 
> spaces are being mounted.
>
> There are various other sysadmin ways of solving the problem but I was hoping 
> for a way to do it within MESA...
>
> Cheers,
> Warrick
>
> ------------
> Warrick Ball
> Postdoc, School of Physics and Astronomy
> University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT
> W.H.Ball at bham.ac.uk
> +44 (0)121 414 4552
>
>
> On Thu, 7 Feb 2019, aaron.dotter at gmail.com wrote:
>
>>  Hi Warrick,
>>  See the section on cache directories in star_job.defaults.  You might set
>>  one up for them all to use.  Have you tried that?
>>
>>  Aaron
>>
>>  On Thu, Feb 7, 2019 at 11:43 AM Warrick Ball via Mesa-users
>>  <mesa-users at lists.mesastar.org> wrote:
>>        Hi everyone,
>>
>>        I have a group of undergraduate students who are running MESA on a
>>        shared
>>        server with just 1 GB of home directory space per student.  MESA
>>        itself
>>        has been installed in a shared (and root-only accessible) area, so
>>        it
>>        doesn't count against their quotas.  However, after running a
>>        roughly
>>        solar-mass track to near the helium flash, many of them are
>>        approaching or
>>        filling their 1 GB quotas.  It turns out this because of all the
>>        cache
>>        files being written to `.mesa_temp_cache` under their MESA work
>>        folder.
>>        Is it possible to stop or limit the use of the cache?
>>
>>        As a temporary fix, I've advised them to delete cached files
>>        manually as
>>        necessary.  I had a look for a control but it seems that the option
>>        of
>>        whether or not to use the caches is hardcoded.  Grepping for "cache"
>>        and
>>        following some function calls, I found this at line 401 (MESA
>>        r10398) in
>>        `star/private/star_private_def.f90`:
>>
>>             logical, parameter :: use_cache = .true.
>>
>>        `use_cache` is then passed to `init` routines for `eos`, `kap`,
>>        `atm` and
>>        `ionization`.  Besides changing this hardcoded value to `.false.`, I
>>        can't
>>        see an option.  Also, I can't see that it's easy to add an option to
>>        the
>>        inlists because of the sequence of the initialisation calls.  This
>>        line is
>>        ultimately called through `star/public/star_lib:starlib_init`, which
>>        is
>>        part of the `before_evolve_loop` subroutine in
>>        `star/job/run_star_support.f90`.  It's called *before* `star_setup`,
>>        which
>>        seems to be what reads the namelist.
>>
>>        Alternatively, is there a way to limit the amount of space the
>>        caches use?
>>        Or tell MESA to clear the caches after some number of steps? 
>>        Perhaps a
>>        control like `clear_cache_interval`?
>>
>>        Cheers,
>>        Warrick
>>
>>
>> 
>>
>>        ------------
>>        Warrick Ball
>>        Postdoc, School of Physics and Astronomy
>>        University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT
>>        W.H.Ball at bham.ac.uk
>>        +44 (0)121 414 4552
>>
>>        _______________________________________________
>>        mesa-users at lists.mesastar.org
>>        https://lists.mesastar.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-users
>>
>> 
>> 
>