Python: Checkpointing

Prerequisites

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

This course introduces the concept of checkpointing - the saving of a program's state while the program is running, such that the program can be restarted from that saved state - and describes how to implement application-level checkpointing for certain types of scientific programming tasks in Python. Attendees will benefit most from this course if they have a clear idea of the types of task which they wish to checkpoint prior to attending.

• Prior attendance at one of the "PPython for Absolute Beginners" or "Python for Programmers" courses or equivalent experience.
• Prior attendance of the "Python: Further Topics" course or equivalent experience.
• Those attending should be able to use a plain text editor (e.g. emacs, gedit, pico, vi) on a Unix system as might be obtained from the Emacs or Vi introductory courses.

Number of sessions: 1

• What is checkpointing?
• Importance of checkpointing
• Designing programs to checkpoint
• Implementing checkpointing in Python
• Use of Python's pickle and cPickle modules
• Testing your implementation of checkpointing

Presentation/demonstration with practical exercises.

Python v. 3 on PWF Linux

• This course is unsuitable for those who have no experience of Python.
• Whilst not a prerequisite, those with little programming experience may benefit from first attending the "Programming Concepts for Beginners" course.
• Those attending this course may also be interested in the "Python: Numerical Programming" course.

One half day session

• Programming and Scripting
• Scientific Computing