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joshspeagle / dynesty

Dynamic Nested Sampling package for computing Bayesian posteriors and evidences
https://dynesty.readthedocs.io/
MIT License
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For pickling, remove 'rstate' from Sampler state #130

Closed dstndstn closed 5 years ago

dstndstn commented 5 years ago

Hi,

We are trying to use Dynesty within the Bilby framework from LIGO, parallelized via MPI.

One issue we hit is that Python 3's built-in pickle module can't pickle "module" objects, and the "Sampler.rstate" object was the numpy.random module:

rstate: <class 'module'> <module 'numpy.random' from '/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/numpy/random/__init__.py'>

Now, it's entirely possible this is user error (we're using the simplest Gaussian example in bilby, so not setting rstate explicitly, etc). It's also possible that this is a horrible idea of how to work around the issue... if one did want to override the rstate, this wouldn't get transmitted to Pool workers...

BUT, this (along with a small patch to bilby) does allow us to run in parallel using MPI!

joshspeagle commented 5 years ago

This seems like a totally reasonable fix. I'll merge this in.