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

[Rob Farmer]

Hi
If you look in the defaults/env_var.list file then you should be able to
set:

export MESA_TEMP_CACHES_DISABLE=1

To disable the temp cache file mechanism, though i don't know if things
will fail when it cant write to $MESA_CACHES_DIR instead.

The other alternative might be to try:
export MESA_TEMP_CACHES_DIR=$TMPDIR
to use temporary storage for the folder.

Otherwise just delete the files as they go. They shouldn't be persisting
anyway in that folder but because your $MESA_DIR would be owned by root and
thus the users cant move a file into that folder then the mv fails and the
file gets left behind.

Rob

On Thu, 7 Feb 2019 at 17:56, Warrick Ball via Mesa-users <
mesa-users at lists.mesastar.org> 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
> >
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> mesa-users at lists.mesastar.org
> https://lists.mesastar.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-users
>
>
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