H5Part development and discussion

[Mark Howison <MHowison AT lbl.gov>]

Hi all,

I'm not sure who subscribes to this list, but I would like to announce
that there is currently a project underway to refactor the H5Part
codebase into a new library called H5hut (HDF5 Utility Toolkit), which
will subsume the current H5Part and H5Block modules and add a new
module for finite element meshes called H5Fed that is under
development by Achim and Benedikt.

I have been introducing a number of performance-related changes to
H5Part over the last year or two, and am in the process of merging
those from the H5Part/1.6 branch into the H5hut trunk.

The major design difference for H5hut is that it pools functionality
that is "core" to all the modules into a common h5core module. Achim
refactored the H5Part module to use this new architecture, and I
recently merged in the modifications to H5Part from the LBL side. I am
currently refactoring H5Block to make use of h5core.

Eventually, I also plan to merge a fourth module called H5MultiBlock
that I wrote to more easily handle regular 3D grids with halo regions
that need to be exchanged via MPI. I will also be merging in a
regression test I wrote for H5Part, and plan to write a corresponding
test for H5Block.

From now on, I will start posting our conversations about design
decisions to this list, in case there are users who would like to have
input on our choices.

Thanks
Mark Howison
Visualization Group
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab