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

[SamuelKey]

Renato,

Just checked again, Exodus-II is open source now.  Look here --

http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=exodusii

Maybe easier -- http://sourceforge.net/  and enter string "exodusii" in 
search.  Of course, one also has to get a netCDF library since Exodus-II 
is a layer between your code and the netCDF library, but that is easy 
also --

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/

Exodus-II is written in c, but has a Fortran binding. Unless it has 
changed recently, there are far more uses of Exodus-II in Fortran 
programs than in c programs.

Sam

Renato N. Elias wrote:
> Can anyone shed some light above how is the support status for parallel 
> file formats in ParaView?
> 
> In my lab most of the students still work with Fortran. It seems that 
> "the universe nowadays only speaks C++ (and Python for scripting)" which 
> force us to do an extensive evaluation for a good and well supported 
> parallel file format to invest before struggling with all that mixed 
> languages interface/wrapping annoyances (not everybody working with 
> programs are programmers, there's still some engineers like civil, 
> mechanical, chemical, etc... doing science...).
> 
> I could say that our my concerns about choosing a file format to sticky 
> with is:
> 
> -- Easiness for installation and use (in this sense, Ensight is 
> wonderful since we don't need extra libraries. It's insane when we need 
> to compile 50 MB of libraries to link with a 2 MB program that uses just 
> one routine of such library);
> -- Easiness for interfacing (most of the libraries nowadays is written 
> in C++ for C++ programmers which discourage its use by C and Fortran 
> programs. Ok, we can always spend some time in interfacing it, but, a 
> library should offer more functionality and flexibility than annoyances)
> -- Portability.
> 
> Some time ago there was some interesting posts from Jean Favre and 
> Dominic about this, which give us some overview about the subject.
> 
> http://www.paraview.org/pipermail/paraview/2008-May/008070.html
> http://www.paraview.org/pipermail/paraview/2008-May/008071.html
> 
> My 2 cents for the discussion, *from a Fortran perspective*, is:
> 
> 1). ENSIGHT:
> 1.1. Quite simple to implement and use (no need for extra libraries and 
> all that stuff. Just a few Fortran statements do the job);
> 1.2. Implicit support for transient data and parallelism;
> 1.3. Depending on the number of processes we might have a huge number of 
> small/medium files since each point and cell data variable is stored in 
> one file (sometimes it can be a serious problem);
> 1.4. Not compressed (too bad);
> 1.5. Not so well supported *as a parallel format* by ParaView yet. After 
> the change to deal (after PV 2.2.1) with multigroup datasets some 
> functionalities were lost until reimplementation.
> 1.6. Supported by ParaView, Visit and Ensight (of course)
> 
> 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
> 3.2. The website describing the library is a bit down lately...
> 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... .
> 3.4. From my knowledge, XDMF is supported by Ensight, ParaView and Visit 
> also --> not sure about how good is that support.
> 
> 4). EXODUS II:
> 4.1. Same as 2.1 --> I already tried more than once to find something 
> about Exodus format. There's a good documentation in SANDIA/SEACAS page 
> but the library is not open source (it's a license based distribution) 
> which turns it a bit complicated to adopt;
> 4.2. Nothing to say about timea nd compression support since I never 
> used it;
> 4.3. It must be well supported by PV since it's a Sandia's format;
> 
> regards
> 
> Renato.
> 
> 
> 
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