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Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) is a set of file formats (HDF4/HDF5) designed to manage, process, and store large amounts of heterogeneous data. HDF5 is built for fast Input/Output processing and storage.
Paraview enables to process data in HDF format. To do so, the result mey to be split in two files a .xmdf, which is loaded by paraview, and a .h5 storing the mesh properties (points and connectivity) as well as attributes (lists such as velocity, displacement etc).
To implement such option, HDF5 library needs to be installed for instance by adding –download-hdf5 in the configure step when installing PETSc library. Then, load in your code the library “#include <petscviewerhdf5.h>”
.xdmf files are similar to .vtu and to find more information about its formatting click here.
Here is an example of a .xdmf file loading results from a .h5 file: