Read MPS or MPO written by a different operating system?

Question

Hi Miles,

I'm new to ITensor. I have a problem when I use "readFromFile" to read MPS or MPO (written on my macbook using "writeToFile") on Linux. The error is:

From line 902, file /users/home/XXXX/itensor/itensor/itensor_interface.ih

Unrecognized type when reading tensor from istream

Unrecognized type when reading tensor from istream
Aborted (core dumped)

The files created on linux cannot be read on macbook, either. Could you please tell me how to solve this problem? Thanks.

Jin

Answer 1

Hi Jin,
Good question. Unfortunately ITensor uses a very simple method to save objects to disk (just a raw binary write/read) which is not guaranteed to work across different platforms.

This is something we would like to improve but has not been a high priority for us yet. Is it a high priority for your use case? If so I can try to make this improvement sooner rather than later.

Best,
Miles

Comments

Hi Miles,

Thank you for your reply. It's not a high priority for me. But it would be  more convenient because my account on our server has very limited storage. Sometimes I'd like to download those files and deal with them on my mac. Don't worry if you are busy with other things.

Best,
Jin