[petsc-users] binary writing to tecplot

[Jed Brown]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 04:40, Benjamin Sanderse <B.Sanderse at cwi.nl> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I am trying to output parallel data in binary format that can be read by
> Tecplot. For this I use the TecIO library from Tecplot, which provide a set
> of Fortran/C subroutines. With these subroutines it is easy to write binary
> files that can be read by Tecplot, but, as far as I can see, they can not
> be directly used with parallel Petsc vectors. On a single processor
> everything works fine, but on more processors it fails.
> I am thinking now of different workarounds:
>
> 1. Create a sequential vector from the parallel vector, and call the TecIO
> subroutines with this sequential vector. For large problems this will
> probably be too slow, and actually I don't know how to copy the content of
> a parallel vector into a sequential one.
> 2. Write a tecplot file from each processor, with the data from that
> processor. The problem is that this requires combining the files
> afterwards, and this is probably not easy (certainly not in binary format?).
> 3. Change the tecplot subroutines or write own binary output with
> VecView(). It might not be easy to get the output right so that Tecplot
> understands it.
>

Are you using DMDA or do you have your own unstructured mesh? Supposedly
Tecplot can read HDF5, so you might be able to use PETSc's parallel HDF5
viewer and still read it with Tecplot.

What other formats does Tecplot support and how do they recommend handling
parallelism? The open source visualization packages have put a great deal
of effort into supporting many different data formats (including Tecplot's
native format). It would be rather unfair if Tecplot didn't support some of
the open source formats.
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