Race condition when running multiple parallel instances of CAT

[felipeZ]

The problem

When running multiple instances of CAT in parallel, using the prep function (from CAT.base import prep), the following error is raised:

[Errno 17] File exists: '.../workdir/plams_workdir'

The error is due to multiple Python processes running Plams independently resulting in multiple attends to create a plams_workdir in the current work directory.

Possible solution

I have bypassed the issue by using the retry decorator on the function invoking CAT, but a more robust behaviour could be that CAT invokes PLAMS using different (temporal) workdirs instead of the current workdir from where CAT is invoked