Reading Restarted Simulation Output

An increasingly important problem that we are facing is that of reading in the output files from simulations that have been restarted (note that this is different from reading restart files). When a simulation is started, it continues a simulation previously executed, but typically writes to a completely new set of files.

A simulation that was restarted multiple times will have multiple output file sets, each containing data over a different range of time. It is usually desirable to see all of these times as one contiguous group. So far this has been done by loading files independently (i.e. doing nothing), concatenating all the data into one file (or file group), or hacking up an animation to change filenames in the reader. None of these is a good solution.

It has long been proposed to simply change the readers to select file series or series of file series. The problem is that doing so can obfuscate the GUI, an issue that has stalled the implementation for the Exodus reader for years. Furthermore, the solution would have to be reworked independently for each reader. There is already a similar request for the SPCTH reader, and more may follow.

The new pipeline time support gives us more options for allowing us to read restarted simulation outputs. This page captures the design of such a solution.

Potential Designs

So far I can think of two potential designs using the new time support. The first is to use a #Time Multiplexer Filter and the second is to use a #Time File Series Reader