Checkpointing in FitBenchmarking

In some cases, fitting can take a long time and rerunning the fits to change output options is inefficient. For this situation we provide a checkpointing file.

Using the checkpointing feature

As indicated above this feature is currently only for rendering changes to the presentation of runs although we plan to extend it to combining and filtering runs in the future.

By default, when running FitBenchmarking it will create a checkpoint file in the results directory which will contain all the information required to create output tables and plots.

To generate new reports for an existing checkpoint, use the --load_checkpoint option:

fitbenchmarking --load_checkpoint

This can use the same options file as in the original run but with the output changed, or seperate one as long as the results directory and checkpointing file are the same.

There is also a seperate tool for working with checkpoint files fitbenchmarking-cp that can be used to regenerate the reports.

fitbenchmarking-cp report --help

Warnings

Using --load_checkpoint will not re-run any results or run any new combinations that have been added to the options file.

This command also does not check that the checkpoint file has not been edited manually. Manual editing may be desired for removing or combining data while these features are developed but should be done with caution to ensure results are still comparable.