Typically, to get one more correct decimal digit in Monte Carlo, you need to increase the sample by the factor of 100. That makes Monte Carlo applications computationally expensive. Some of them take days or weeks while others may take several months of computations. For such applications, saving intermediate results to a file is essential to be able to continue computation using that result in case the application is terminated intentionally or abnormally.

In the case of BRNGs, saving intermediate results means that BRNG state and other descriptive data, if any, should be saved to a binary file. Since BRNG state is not directly accessible for the user, who operates with the random stream descriptor only, VS provides routines to save/restore random stream descriptive data to and from binary files:

The binary file name is specified by the

fname

parameter. In the

vslSaveStreamF

function, a valid random stream to be written is specified by a stream input parameter. In

vslLoadStreamF

, the stream is the output parameter that specifies a random stream that has been created on the basis of the binary file data. Each of these functions returns the error status of the operation. A non-negative value indicates an error.

In addition to saving and restoring random stream descriptive data to and from binary files, VS provides the routines to save and restore the stream descriptive data to and from memory:

Memory buffer is specified by the

memptr

pointer. To compute size of memory sufficient to hold random stream descriptive data, use VS service routine:

This routine returns the amount of memory in bytes necessary for random stream descriptive data.

Non-deterministic random number generators support service functions for saving and restoring random streams in a regular way. If you restore the state of the generator using

LoadStreamF

or

LoadStreamM

routines on the hardware that does not support the corresponding non-deterministic source, the functions return an error message.