akabane

Hi Jean-Luc,
with Apprentice you're not allowed to output .sim files, which are the ones that would allow you to resume simming at any point or give the DOPnet a “initial pose”.

Though if you want to cache out the RESULTS of your sim, it's completely possible, as long as you take your data out of dopnet into sops, and then use a rop output node, or a file node set to write.

I might be mistaken, but ROPs shouldn't be more about transferring data from RAM (or directly from sim) to disk? That's the part that takes time, it's not actually computational intensive. But for example, a large scale pyro can take easily more than 10gb per frame, and regardless of the hard disk's speed that's something that's going to take some time.
Not 1 hr per ROPfram'e as you're experiencing, but if you already cached out the sim, there's no reason why it should take that long. Unless you're like ROPping out the entire scene every frame somehow.

+1!
I haven't been able to follow the latest ones live, really eager to see them online as soon as possible!