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parallel option for user defined files needed by the DYNARE project

We should allow users to declare non standard files needed to run the projects, e.g. subroutines possibly called within the _steadystate file. In these cases, remote threads crash since the steady state cannot be run (only threads run locally would work). I have already written a fix to this in masterParallel.m which uses a new field local_files of parallel_info

options_.parallel_info.local_files

we need an interface to fill this field.

We have some options:

1)use the configuration file, but I do not think this would be a great idea since those cases are specific for individual dynare projects and not for general configurations of dynare.

  1. use a new option local_files of the dynare command, triggered as follows, assuming a dynare project called mymodel.mod, where the files file1.m, file2.mat, myfolder/file3.txt in the project directory are needed by, e.g., the steady state file:

dynare mymodel parallel local_files=(file1.m)

this would trigger the following entry in options_.parallel_info:

options_.parallel_info.local_files = {'', 'file1.m'};

where the empty element indicates that the file is in the project directory and not in a subdirectory.

Another example:

dynare mymodel parallel local_files=(file1.m, file2.mat, myfolder/file3.txt)

this would trigger the following entry in options_.parallel_info (we need to parse and separate the subfolder from the name of the file)

options_.parallel_info.local_files = { '', 'file1.m'; '', 'file2.mat'; 'myfolder/', 'file3.txt' };

  1. use the option local_files inside, e.g., the estimation command: estimation(datafile=mydata,mode_compute=0, ..., local_files=(file1.m, file2.mat, myfolder/file3.txt))

which would trigger in the same way the entry in options_.parallel_info.local_files

Which option would be best for you?