Add new feature ‘custom diagnostics’ to Fluid2D

[kegelkugel]

Custom diagnostics allow to store any information that can be extracted from the model state in the diagnostics file. With this, we can provide a high frequency output of a diagnostics we are interested in without creating a huge history file. This may make the diagnostics file more useful for a wider range of Fluid2D users.

An example is provided where custom diagnostics are used to measure the drift of a vortex that he experiences due to the beta-effect on a rotating planet.

Note: the experiment only works correctly with the fixed QG model (see pull request "Fix QG model")

[kegelkugel]

Possibly unexpected results in multi-core runs

When the example experiment is run on multi-cores, the position of the vortex is not calculated correctly, because the core 0 that is responsible for writing diagnostics only sees one part of the domain. Before this pull request is merged, one should pose the question of how to handle multi-core runs.

[kegelkugel]

Comments on the multi-core situation

The way custom diagnostics are implemented in this pull request works when Fluid2D is run on a single core, which is already a gain. In a multi-core setting, however, the example does not create the expected output for the reason stated above. I see three options to handle this situation:

• add a warning to the corresponding code to make the user aware of this limitation. Pros: no increased work; easy solution for the most common case of a single core run. Cons: result depends on the number of cores used; custom diagnostics might not be useful on multicores.

• let the custom diagnostics be calculated on every single core and store the result of each computation in different fields. That means, if the simulation is run on a single core, it produces the custom diagnostics "x_pos", if it is run on two cores it produces "x_pos_0" and "x_pos_1"; it is then up to the user to extract the information he's interested in. Pros: rather easy to implement; gives full information. Cons: file size increases with the number of cores; additional work for the user to post-process the data.

• make some implementation similar to mpitools.local_to_global, which is already used in the calculation of the normal diagnostics. Pro: best result. Con: difficult to implement for both the developers and for the user, because the user has to specify how to merge the results calculated on the different cores; for the given example, the merge would mean: take the position calculated by the core with the maximum vorticity. Another con: might make the single-core case more difficult than necessary.

I prefer option 1, but it is up to the reviewer to decide.