[petsc-users] PETSc recommended visualization packages

[Jed Brown]

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 21:44, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> What are the recommended visualization packages for use with PETSc (for
> example making movies of contour plots and isosurfaces) and what are the
> recommended data formats to use to save Vecs for visualization?


VisIt and ParaView are the primary choices. In my experience, VisIt is a
more complete system, but ParaView is easier to install and probably easier
to get started with.

The VTK XML or binary formats are the easiest to get started with. See
src/ts/examples/tutorials/ex14.c for an example of writing an XML file
containing two fields on different grids (2D and 3D, structured, but
deformed) in parallel. All file formats are horrible non-extensible crud,
usually grown out of a particular application with structured grids of
low-order/non-exotic basis functions on unstructured grids. They tend not to
retain enough semantic information to reconstruct a state for further
computations and also work for visualization without needing additional
application-provided information.
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