[Paraview] Parallel file formats (again)...

[Dominik Szczerba]

Hi Renato,

You should strongly consider HDF5. In addition, this is not true that 
the worlds speaks C++. Most of my colleague physicists use FORTRAN, and 
this will not change anytime soon. Advantage of using HDF5 would be not 
forcing you to do this (dramatic) change. You could (should!) consider 
FORTRAN 90 instead, 77 is really an old hat :)

Also see some points below.

> 2). XML/VTK:
> 2.1. Almost impossible for a Fortran user to implement, so, we're forced 
> to interface with VTK in order to write something;
> 2.2. Time series support has been introduced in some sense ;o)
> 2.3. It's a bit complicated to understand. Ok, it's XML and we should 
> use it (and believe on it ;o) ) through some library, so, it's not 
> supposed to "hand-implementation";
> 2.4. Encoding/compression is supported (which is really good)
> 2.5. It should be the most well parallel file format supported by 
> ParaView (after EXODUS, maybe)
> 2.6. Only supported by VTK based softwares (ParaView, Visit, MayaVi)
> 
> 3). XDMF/HDF5:
> 3.1. Same as 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3

Does not apply to HDF5. only XDMF. I discourage you to use XDMF, 
especially if you are a fortran progammer.

> 3.2. The website describing the library is a bit down lately...

Does not apply to HDF5, on the contrary.

> 3.3. HDF5 seems a very promising file format. It has some development 
> concern about its use by other scientific languages besides being 
> flexible, compressed, cross platform, etc... .

correct.

> 3.4. From my knowledge, XDMF is supported by Ensight, ParaView and Visit 
> also --> not sure about how good is that support.

See my other email about XDMF. You are stuck with FORTRAN, and yes, as 
most (not all) of the world speaks C++, I doubt this will be fixed.

bye
Dominik

> 
> regards
> 
> Renato.
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> ParaView mailing list
> ParaView at paraview.org
> http://www.paraview.org/mailman/listinfo/paraview

-- 
Dominik Szczerba, Ph.D.
Biomedical Simulation Group
Computer Vision Lab CH-8092 Zurich
http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~domi