[aspect-devel] Raw data output

[Timo Heister]

> What does deal.II use for checkpointing?

a combination of a custom/efficient binary format to store the
solution vectors and the distributed mesh and boost:serialize for all
the data structures in aspect itself (parameters, etc.).

>  That might be a good choice
> for the "canonical" output format.

No, I don't think we can put enough information into a general output
format so that we can a) snapshot/resume very efficiently and b) have
this readable for anyone else (for example hdf5+xdmf).

>  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.

One disadvantage is that hdf5 does not allow data compression in the
parallel file format whereas the binary vtu format we are using right
now allows this (we are using zlib). Our output works with paraview
and visit already.
But: in the long run I want to add hdf5+xdmf output to deal.II. I
already did some experiments with it and it is not hard to do. Aspect
would gain the option to output hdf5 at that point automatically.

-- 
Timo Heister
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~heister/