On Jan 5, 2012, at 6:28 PM, Jed Brown wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 18:17, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> BTW: It is also possible to put many vectors and matrices in the same file
> and read them in using several different ways using PetscBinaryRead(). I
> (personally) think any approach that involves creating hundreds of files is
> nuts.
>
> To be fair, such files (in PETSc binary format) do not have an index (e.g. to
> see the names and types of objects available in the file) or implement "seek"
> behavior (to just read the 19th vector).
Yes, it is not an extremely well designed and implemented top quality binary
format like HDF5. Nor does it intend to be. And it is not suitable if you need
random access to hundreds of PETSc objects, but for simple things like making
movies in MATLAB or statistical analysis it is often fine to store all the
objects in one file.
Barry
