[aspect-devel] Raw data output

[Walter Landry]

Timo Heister <heister at math.tamu.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 12:33 AM, Wolfgang Bangerth
> <bangerth at math.tamu.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> I'd like to output particle information (position, velocity, etc) in
>>> an easy to parse format for use in scientific analysis.  The VTK
>>> format works great for visualization but is hard to parse in Python
>>> or MATLAB scripts.  Is there any format preference in Aspect when
>>> outputting raw simulation data (e.g. HDF5 vs. NetCDF vs. ASCII)?
>>
>> I don't have any. I would say use whatever is most convenient for
>> whatever it is you want to do with it. If someone wants another format
>> in addition we can always implement that too.
> 
> In the long run there is some interest in supporting hdf5 output for
> graphical data (from a different project). If we do implement that in
> deal.ii it would make sense to put data like this also into hdf5. For
> now I would go the easiest (ascii) route. But we should extend the
> configuration of deal.II to allow hdf5 at some point.

What does deal.II use for checkpointing?  That might be a good choice
for the "canonical" output format.  Also, one nice thing about HDF5 is
that you can write a small auxillary XDMF file.  Paraview and Visit
can then read the XDMF file to interpret the HDF5.

Cheers,
Walter Landry