Restarting Parameter Fits

The rsdfit executable includes a restart sub-command for restarting parameter fits from existing parameter fit, which can be either a MCMC or NLOPT .npz result file. To restart from a specific result, simply pass the name of the result file and specify the appropriate model to load and the number of additional iterations to run.

The calling sequence is:

$ rsdfit restart -h
usage: rsdfit [-h] [--version] {mcmc,nlopt,restart,analyze} ... 

From more help on each of the subcommands, type:
rsdfit mcmc -h
rsdfit nlopt -h
rsdfit restart -h
rsdfit analyze -h restart
       [-h] -m MODEL -i ITERATIONS [-b BURNIN] [--silent] [--debug]
       restart_files [restart_files ...]

positional arguments:
  restart_files         the name of the existing results file to restart from;
                        multiple files can be restarted at once, but as many
                        parallel processes as files must be present

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -m MODEL, --model MODEL
                        file name holding the model path to load (required)
  -i ITERATIONS         the number of additional iterations to run (required)
  -b BURNIN             the number of steps to consider burnin, if running
                        MCMC
  --silent              silence the standard output to the console
  --debug               whether to print more info about the mpi4py.Pool
                        object

The code will run the number of additional iterations specified by the user via the -i flag. Upon finishing, a new results file holding the concatenation of the result that was restarted and the new result will be written to file. Then, lastly, the original result file that was restarted will be deleted.

Note

It is possible to specify multiple result files on the command line to restart. In this case, a parameter fit will be restarted for each file passed, and the fits will run in parallel. Thus, there must be enough parallel MPI processes available to run each restart file specified on the command line. If this isn’t the case, the code will crash with an error.