Store information about the halo-size in the allocated Quantity

[twicki]

Description

In order to have the option to check for correct sizes on data, the information of what halo-size was used to generate the Quantity should be stored with the Quantity.

This is (self-contained) preliminary work to handle #239 properly, as we've seen issues without this information.

How has this been tested?

Just CI-framework.

Checklist

• My code follows the style guidelines of this project
• I have performed a self-review of my own code
• I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas
• I have made corresponding changes to the documentation
• My changes generate no new warnings
• New check tests, if applicable, are included

[romanc]

Looking good to me - just a question about naming things, which is - as always - the hardest part 😄 🙈

[romanc]

Is _description_ a magic docstring feature that I don't know about or did we loose the description of gt4py_backend here?

[twicki]

bad cleanup, thanks

[romanc]

I'm not so sure about the name here because it's not really the number of halo points, right? If I put 3, there will be more then 3 halo points. Though not optimal either, I'd stick with what we already have (n_halo) to avoid confusion. Maybe we could do "halo size" instead?

[twicki]

well, n_halo is just number of halo points, as per

NDSL/ndsl/initialization/subtile_grid_sizer.py

Line 28 in c180927

n_halo: number of halo points

or

NDSL/ndsl/initialization/grid_sizer.py

Line 14 in c180927

"""Number of horizontal halo points for produced arrays."""

or

NDSL/ndsl/comm/boundary.py

Line 44 in c180927

and number of halo points.

[romanc]

then let's change all of them because they are equally wrong in that sense?

[twicki]

this is the lingo that is used to describe the halo size. This is not changeable

[romanc]

Isn't our job here to dare new things and sometimes break with (old) conventions? Like, we tell atmospheric scientists that they can now write code in python(-ish) and that they can have variable names longer than 5 characters?

We even make use of the term "halo size" in our introduction examples when referring to the nhalo argument of the boilerplate functions.

NDSL/examples/NDSL/02_NDSL_basics.ipynb

Line 19 in c180927

"The `StencilFactory` object enables the sharing of stencil properties across multiple stencils as well as \"build and execute\" the stencil. To help ease the introduction, the [`boilerplate` module](./boilerplate.py) contains a function `get_one_tile_factory` that takes the domain size, halo size, and backend of interest and returns a `StencilFactory` object. For more details about the objects needed to create the `StencilFactory`, the reader can view the [`get_one_tile_factory`](./boilerplate.py#get_one_tile_factory) function."

NDSL/examples/NDSL/03_orchestration_basics.ipynb

Line 110 in c180927

"Next, we'll create a simple driver that defines the domain and halo size, specifies the backend (`dace:cpu` in order to use DaCe), and uses the boilerplate code to create a stencil and quantity factory objects. These objects help define the computational domain used for this particular example. After defining quantities (`in_field` and `out_field`) to hold the appropriate values and creating an object `local_sum` for our combined stencil/Python calculation, `local_sum` is called to perform the computation. In the output, we can see DaCe orchestrating the code. "

[romanc]

Maybe "halo size" rather than "halo points"?

[twicki]

see above