[Paraview] Serial & Parallel - Scientific Data

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

>
> The options presented when saving data:
>

> - Data Mode: ASCII | BINARY | APPENDED
> - Encode Appended Data: TRUE | FALSE
> - Compressor Type:  NONE | ZLIB
>
> *What do the mean and how they affect performance?*
>

These determine how the binary data (your arrays, point coordinates etc) is
saved in the file. ASCII is not to be used to anything but small dataset
for debugging. BINARY saves the data as binary, however it still needs to
encode it (using base64) so that the XML can be parsed correctly.
Generally, you want to pick APPENDED (where the binary data is added at the
end of the XML header(ish) and then can be saved as raw binary dump without
any encoding. No encoding implies you can't easily look at the file in a
ASCII text editor, but will be easier to write and read since neither needs
to do any processing to convert the binary data. For appended APPENDED or
BINARY mode, compressor type allows you to pick a compression technique to
use. This minimizes file size but adds computing cost of compressing
/decompressing. It's a trade off between reading more from  the disk or
spending more time decompressing it after reading form disk. Generally,
reading form disk is slower, so you may still be better off compressing.
5.5 offer better compression options like LZ4 & LZMA which may be worth
exploring too.

Before I answer your other questions, what type of data is this? Image
data? Unstructured grid? When you load it on 2 ranks, if you color your
surface by vtkProcessId, is it being read in as paritioned across two ranks
or all of the data is on rank 0?

Utkarsh
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://public.kitware.com/pipermail/paraview/attachments/20180419/e1a70841/attachment.html>