[vtkusers] Adding new file formats into VTK

[tom fogal]

 <1085686923.15167.51.camel at silverymoon> Berk Geveci writes:
>What is you data type? Does the reader have to support parallel reading?
>Streaming?

"MHD" files. I'm the CS nerd so I let other people worry about it, but it
seems to me like vectors of magnetic field strengths at various positions,
written to ASCII-mode files as a series of doubles, plus some other
miscellaneous data. Final caveat: the data are compressed via a custom
run-length encoding algorithm.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding. Parallel reading as in a multithreaded reader
or parallel reading as in the data is distributed across a number of nodes
and I want to congregate / take advantage of that? If it's the former, it
might be nice; the main issue is speed of data import and if that would help
considerably than it would be advantageous. If the latter, no this is all
intended for single-processor workstations which would load all of the data.
Finally, we've no need for streaming at all.

Thanks for the help,

-tom

>On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 15:26, tom fogal wrote:
>> Currently our group has external utilities which convert from the file forma
>t
>> our models output into VTK's format. Particularly for large datasets, this
>> causes a great inefficiency, as the data must be read from the disk, 
>> reformatted in memory, and written back to the disk... and then read back
>> from disk when VTK loads it.
>> 
>> We are interested in extending VTK to recognize the file format we are using
>> to alleviate this excess bottleneck. I was hoping to get some advice on wher
>e
>> to start and some sort of vague time estimate from someone who has done this
>> sort of thing before.
>> 
>> It looks as if we would want a new object derived from a 'vtkDataSetSource'
>> which implements a number of functions (*New, vtkTypeRevisionMacro,
>> PrintSelf, Update, ExecuteInformation, etc...). Am I on the right track?
>> Is there documentation anywhere which explains the member functions that
>> would need to be implemented? Is there a particularly 'good'/simple file
>> reader that we might want to model our code around?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> -tom
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>-- 
>Berk Geveci <berklist at nycap.rr.com>