[Paraview] ParaView Readers and Time-Varying Data Sets

[SamuelKey]

               Notes on ParaView readers I have used.
                      (ParaView Version 2.4.3)

I have used three ParaView Readers for time-varying data sets:
(1) EnSight Gold
(2) ExodusII
(3) ParaView's mydata.pvd
All three allow easy animation. ExodusII and ParaView's mydata.pvd allow 
parallel data sets to be easily read where all of the data sets reside 
on one workstation. Some possibly helpful notes follow:
> 1) EnSight Gold c-binary files written from Fortran-90/95
> Works exceptionally well for time-series data, The EnSight reader 
> expects time-series data and sets ParaView "flags and switches 
> internally" so that the '>'-button on the animation-control bar 
> produces what you would expect. (Don't forget to force big-endian 
> binary output when you write the c-binary stream -- the PV EnSight 
> reader by default expects it. There is a button to alter the reader's 
> setting, however, it is a real bother to change it every time. For 
> Digital Visual Fortran, use FORM='BINARY' and CONVERT='BIG_ENDIAN')  
> An example EnSight *.case file is attached. EnSight file Format: 
> http://www.ensight.com/ensight80docs/Manuals/UserManual.pdf Chapter 11
> 2) Exodus netCDF-based binary files written from Fortran-90/95 (or 
> written from c)
> Works even better than the EnSight reader in PV.  At least two nice 
> advantages: (1) the binary files are hardware/operating system 
> independent, that is, compute on one platform, post process on a 
> different platform without using any file-format translation, and (2) 
> the animations come pre-scripted with a timer "Time = 1.23E-5" running 
> in the lower right corner  of the frame. The selection of sub-domains, 
> if defined in the data, is on the face sheet. Parallel data sets are 
> recognized by the reader via a set of serialized files: mydata000.exo, 
> mydata001.exe, ..., mydata100.exo.
> Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/exodusii  All but the 
> Fortran-binding are contained in PV/bin/vtkexoIIc.dll and 
> PV/bin/vtkNetCDF.dll on WinXX, similarly on Linux.
>
> 3) ParaView's mydata.pvd file referencing vtk-files (legacy or xml, 
> ASCII or binary)
> ParaView's *.pvd file is an ASCII-formatted mother file that 
> references a set of *.vtu,(or *.pvtu) files. The set of files have 
> four important attributes: 'timestep',  'part', 'file' and 'name'. The 
> attribute 'timestep' is assigned an integer (thus, it is advisable to 
> output data at equal time intervals). The attribute 'part' is assigned 
> sequential integers (starting from 1 works for me) that enumerates the 
> individual (displayable!) items making up a complete data set. The 
> attribute 'name' is assigned a character string that is your 
> descriptive label for the part (and will appear on the face sheet the 
> Extract Parts filter).  The attribute 'file' specifies, for example, 
> mydata.p006.to43.vtu -- a displayable vtk-formatted data set for part 
> number 6 at time step number 43. Thus, a single mydata.pvd can 
> reference data enumerated by time step and by part (think 600 files).  
> Starting with ParaView Version 2.4.3 (2.4.2?), this mass of 
> information is animated by simply using the '>'-button on the 
> animation-control bar and it produces what you would expect. Parallel 
> data sets for individual parts at each time step can be referenced by 
> the 'file' attribute, for example, mydata.p003.to67.pvtu -- the *.pvtu 
> files are ASCII-formatted mother-files themselves that refer to 
> displayable vtk-legacy files. Thus, with a single mydata.pvd file, one 
> reference a very large set of files enumerted by time-step, by part 
> and by parallel partition. (Note: The Collection/dataset attribute 
> 'name' is yet to be documented, but is nonetheless real.)







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