[Paraview] FEM solver interfaced with Paraview

[Fabian Wein]

  of the following questions have probably ever been asked, but:
> 
>  1. What is the best format to create a result file readable by Paraview, especially for huge file? after some readings, VTK XML format seems to be the most interesting (parallelization capabilities) compared to the legacy VTK one, am I right or do ou have any other suggestion?
>  2. I’m still trying to figure out if xdmf and/or hdf5 format are relevant, and if they are relevant for my application: any feedback on it?
> 
> The workflow I’m imaginating sounds like:
> 
>                                                                                       Intermediate calculations
> 
> Raw data (ascii file) from my solver --> intermediate file in xdmf or hdf5 format --> Paraview input file (depending on the reader)

To my understanding there is no xdmf OR hdf5: http://xdmf.org/index.php/Main_Page

We also have an own FEM Code. We export directly hdf5 files (w/o xdmf) which we read with an own paraview reader plugin.

Now we would probably try xdmf and see if we can circumvent having an own reader plugin.

hdf5 has libs for all languages (C/C++, Python, Matlab) and e.g. the handling in Python is quite convenient. Almost a one-liner.

The hdf5 C/C++ lib for writing the data is not the best software I know but it is ok.

I would not export to ascii first but directly use the hdf5 libs.

Fabian