Pickled Bundles

At the time of this writing, pickled bundles is a little bit beyond the bleeding edge. The idea is that bundles are formed and then saved as dill pickle files for rapid retrieval. The file aircond_cylinders.py in the aircond example directory provides an example. The latter part of the allways.bash script demonstrates how to run it.

In the future, we plan to support this concept with higher levels of abstraction.

Pickled bundles are clearly useful for algorithm tuning and algorithm experimentation. In some, but not all, settings they can also improve wall-clock performance for a single optimization run. The pickler (e.g., bundle_pickler.py in the aircond example) does not use a solver and can be run once to provide bundles to all cylinders. It can often be assigned as many ranks as the total number of CPUs available. Reading the bundles from a pickle file is much faster than creating them.