Managing Restart Save Start and Stop

Question

In our project use of AEM3D we would like to generate a restart file at a particular point following a spinup period, and not overwrite that restart during the last few days of the simulation. We basically are looking to checkpoint the spinup to use for running experiments in the last days of the simulation.

We have considered using the start_output_restart control parameter as a way to begin restart saves at the end of the extended spinup. The intent was to minimize disk write during spinup for restart times we are not interested in.  When we try to specify the parameter it is getting flagged as not supported. We are using aem3d-1.1.2-535.

The start_output_restart parameter is described in the user manual. Has it been deprecated?

Regarding the desire to not overwrite a particular saved restart, according to the users guide there is no listed control for specifying that restart saves should not take place after a particular time step.

Is the only way to avoid overwriting a particular saved restart to set the iter_out_restart large enough that the desired restart save time step is the last time step that triggers a restart save?

Answer 1

What you want to use in this situation is the save files.  These are exactly the same file format as the restart files but the filenames are date stamped at the output timestep and so are not overwritten.  The lines 

 20000                                              start_output_save

  20000                                              iter_out_save

would write a fille at the 20000th timestep and every 20000 steps after that.