[Paraview] Need advice with parallel file format

[Stephen Wornom]

Mohammad Mirzadeh wrote:
> Hi I am at a critical point in deciding I/O format for my application. 
> So far my conclusion is to use parallel HDF5 for restart files as they 
> are quite flexible and portable across systems.
>
> When it comes to visualization, however, i'm not quite sure. Up until 
> now I've been using pvtu along with vtu files and although they 
> generally work fine, one easily gets in trouble when running big 
> simulations on large number of processors as the number of files can 
> easily get out of control and even simplest utility commands (e.g. ls) 
> takes minutes to finish!
>
> After many thinking I've come to a point to decide between two strategies:
>
> 1) Go with a single parallel HDF5 file that includes data for all 
> time-steps. This makes it all nice and portable except there are two 
> issues. i) It looks like doing MPI-IO might not be as efficient as 
> separate POSIX IO, especially on large number of processors. ii) 
> ParaView does not seem to be able to read HDF5 files in parallel
>
> 2) Go with the same pvtu+vtu strategy except take precautions to avoid 
> file explosions. I can think of two strategies here: i) use nested 
> folders to separate vtu files from pvtu and also each time step ii) 
> create an IO group communicator with much less processors that do the 
> actual IO.
>
> My questions are 1) Is the second approach necessarily more efficient 
> than MPI-IO used in HDF5? and 2) Is there any plan to support parallel 
> IO for HDF5 files in paraview?
>
>
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Are your meshes structured or unstructured? How many vertices in your 
meshes?

Stephen

-- 
stephen.wornom at inria.fr
2004 route des lucioles - BP93
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