[yt-dev] standard for code meta data

[Matthew Turk]

Hi Mike,

On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 9:11 PM, Michael Zingale
<michael.zingale at stonybrook.edu> wrote:
> I'm playing around with the Maestro/BoxLib frontend.  Maestro (and Castro)
> plotfiles contain a file called job_info that stores a lot of metadata,
> including the values of all runtime parameters and the git hashes
> corresponding to which versions of the various codes were used to build the
> executable.  Currently we have all of the runtime parameters stored in the
> parameters dictionary.  I'd like to add the version control hashes in a
> dictionary as well.  I can add them to the same parameters file, but I am
> wondering if other codes use a standard place for this.

Well, no, for the most part "parameters" is a pretty overloaded place
where we dump things that (in 3.0) yt does *not* rely on.  Individual
frontends might, but we are attempting to stamp out all queries of
"parameters" outside of the frontend specific code.  There's also the
contents of "minimal representation" (._mrep on a Dataset) which are
specified as:

    _attr_list = ("dimensionality", "refine_by", "domain_dimensions",
                  "current_time", "domain_left_edge", "domain_right_edge",
                  "unique_identifier", "current_redshift", "output_hash",
                  "cosmological_simulation", "omega_matter", "omega_lambda",
                  "hubble_constant", "name")

Now, these are up for grabs and are only used for the (currently down)
hub upload, but they do cover the various things that yt expects to
have accessible.

>
> Ultimately I'd like to save some of this information (especially the code
> hashes) in the output files that yt generates: i.e. as png metadata, simple
> postscript comments for eps files, or pdf metadata for pdf files.  This will
> help complete the link toward reproducibility in that it will preserve the
> chain of information from code to output to plot.
>

This would be quite amazing.

> Mike
>
> --
> Michael Zingale
> Associate Professor
>
> Dept. of Physics & Astronomy • Stony Brook University • Stony Brook, NY
> 11794-3800
> phone:  631-632-8225
> e-mail: Michael.Zingale at stonybrook.edu
> web: http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/mzingale
>
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