[petsc-dev] hdf5 self-describing output?

[Jed Brown]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 10:04, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:

> You can however point the xdmf to an HDF5 file with multiple timesteps.


Be careful with this. Last I heard, neither VisIt or ParaView handled large
numbers of time steps well when using a single XDMF file.

I don't think the VTK output can ever be a complete solution and I'm
skeptical that XDMF could be used as a checkpointing mechanism. At this
point, VTK is just a practical way to get vis in parallel with zero
dependencies.

I have a dream of eventually having model code (via the DM interface)
callable by the vis plugin so that we could store only state variables (e.g.
density, momentum, energy) and compute derived quantities (e.g. velocity,
pressure, temperature, lift, drag, fluxes, stresses) in a consistent way. As
it is, you have to write loads of redundant information into files if you
want to visualize it. That's lame.
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