[petsc-dev] PETSc recommended visualization packages

[Matthew Knepley]

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 08:46, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>> Should we make a new viewer based on VTK binary that automatically manages
>> the multiple files and headers etc?
>
>
> Perhaps, but you still lose a lot of information with VTK binary, in the
> sense that it's usually no longer useful as a checkpoint. I think we would
> be better off porting/generalizing the DHM viewer I wrote for Dohp over to
> PETSc and provide VisIt and ParaView plugins for viewing it. If we do that,
> I would like to get away from HDF5 in the process, probably in favor of a
> SQLite index with a binary object store, so it would be a rewrite as much as
> a port.
>
> Note that with such a system, if you link to VTK, you can automatically
> write in any VTK format to make a file that is viewable without a plugin
> (though this isn't the lowest memory way to create such a file).
>

<Excerpted from discussion with Jed> I think that HDF5 is a good choice
because you can write a full checkpoint, and also interface
with plain vanilla visualization using the xdmf specification. This is what
we do in PyLith.

   Matt

-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments
is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments
lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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