H5Part development and discussion

[Achim Gsell <Achim.Gsell AT psi.ch>]

On Tuesday 19 June 2007 16:15, John Biddiscombe wrote:
>  Thanks Kurt and John for the explanations.
>  
>  One further question....does H5Block have a concept of time? I would like
>  to store a series of volumes as time steps. There are 800 time steps and
>  the data is 600^3 (it's quite large). I could manage with one time step per
>  file, but my preference is to lump it all together.   

H5Block is an extension of H5Part and has the same concept of time. You have 
the time-steps from H5Part and may have block data in these time-steps.

>  An Observation.
>  
>  I see that you have made a vector field out of 3 components inside a 
> group. 
This is a nice and simple way of handling things. However, for the H5Part 
data I am generating, I have done the following
>  Density
>  Pressure
>  Position_0
>  Position_1
>  Position_2
>  K
>  sigma
>  Velocity_0
>  Velocity_1
>  Velocity_2
>  
>  and added a simple group name parsing routine which detects when N 
components with the same name exist and allows you to read them into a 
3component array instead of 3 one component arrays.
>  
>  The reason I did this was because of the possibility to read any scalar 
variable as X coordinate, Y or Z, and recombine arrays arbitrarily. The code 
parses the group names and by default reconstructs your arrays based on the 
naming scheme above - but if you request "Position_0 Pressure Velocity_2" as 
coordinates
>  then you can read these three as a single 'field' and use them as (say) 
> the 
position coordinate (and so on with velocity etc)
>  
>  I'm not saying that you can't do it by lumping them into the same group as 
you have done with the block data - but have you any comments on my 
approach? - I can seem myself having two grouping schemes if I use H5Block 
for volume data too?

Whether this is reasonable or not depends on your needs - you may do 
something 
similar with H5Block ...

Achim