[petsc-users] Output portability, binary, HDF5, ascii

[Arturo Fountain]

Greetings:

I've been using the PETSc libraries for a few weeks now and am very
impressed with the software. Great work folks!

I'm writing with an issue I've been unable to work around. I'd like to
save output and import it into an external program (hdfview or matlab,
for example). Vectors are no problem to output but as mentioned at
https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/mailman/htdig/petsc-users/2010-January/005796.html,
this is not possible in PETSc for matrices. Furthermore: "It won't buy
you any speed, disk space, or portability."

Certainly the PETSc binary format works fine for PETSc I/O but I am
unable to find anything to convert between this format and any other.
I'm most concerned with portability; I would like to utilize external
visualization packages. Is it standard practice to simply use ASCII
output? I can certainly do that but for larger problems size will
certainly become an impending issue....

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer,

Arturo