[Paraview] Reading 8GB Volume

[Kent Eschenberg]

It seems that the most efficient way to store and read a 2048^3 volume of unsigned bytes is as a single 8GB array. After using D3 to spread the array over a parallel 64-bit system volume rendering should also be optimum.

However, it seems the good old VTK XML formats using appended raw data are, well, "old" in that they require a 32-bit byte count which is of course inadequate for 8GB.

Is there a way around this or do I need to abandon the VTK XML format for this case? Are there other file formats that someone could suggest? Can ParaView's raw data reader handle this array?

TIA!
Kent
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center