Well, this last week has proven interesting at work.  A few weeks ago I was contacted by someone curious about the differences/advantages between various file formats for Visualization.  Specifically, they were looking at XMdf, XDmf, Exodus, and VTK.  I told them what I knew, and that has started off some very interesting discussions.

Most recently, tho, we started discussing the possibility of me adding support for their existing formats, rather than them converting to a new format (at least in the short term).  I had already written a file reader for a similar format, ADCIRC, so I didn’t think this would be hard.   The format they’re using was listed as “NetCDF CF“.  NetCDF is a pretty generic file format, similar to HDF5, and CF is a “Climate Forecasting” convention.  NetCDF has a pretty strange way of doing things, but it didn’t take long before I figured it out.  I’ve already got some code written to decipher & read the grid into VTK structures, but the data is proving difficult because it’s “edge centered”, instead of cell or point centered.  I haven’t figured out how to deal with that, but luckily the guys on the other end have made my life a little bit easier by switching from this format to the “Quoddy” Format, which is all point-centered.

So basically, I’m up to my waist in File Format issues.  It’s ok though, I actually enjoy it.  It’s a fun form of cryptography, deciphering cryptic files and data structures, often with little to no direction (As evidenced by ytnef).  So I’m having fun.. Now, if only our new viz cluster would finally get approved and installed, so it didn’t take me 5 minutes to compile my code.
[tag:work][tag:hpc][tag:simulation][tag:format]

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