[petsc-dev] hdf5 self-describing output?

[Richard Katz]

I think that PetscViewerBinaryMatlabXXX() is a good model for this hdf5 Viewer.  Each binary output file is accompanied by a light-weight descriptor file.

http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-2/snapshots/petsc-current/docs/manualpages/DM/PetscViewerBinaryMatlabOpen.html

Incidentally, I guess the reason that PetscViewerBinaryMatlabXXX() exists outside of the VecView() and PetscBagView() context is that they must be aware of DMDAs.  It seems a bit strange that there is no generic "VecDMDAView()"

> 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.

Does this violate PETSc policy of being science-neutral?  Or do you mean this is all implemented in application-code?  Seems to me that the user should be responsible for physics-based post-processing of the output (though maybe I have misunderstood you).

Thanks
Rich




________________________________
Richard Foa Katz
Dept Earth Sciences, Univ Oxford
http://foalab.earth.ox.ac.uk