Merged Upstream, Reads via openPMD-api

[ax3l]

Hi @xxirii @GBlaclard,

Our collaborator and one of the VisIt maintainers, @dpugmire, merged an updated version of this plugin upstream into the VisIt 3.0 mainline:
visit-dav/visit#3996

Potentially we could try to pull in the changes (build fixes) that David applied here as well.

Our goal is to further update this plugin (now mainline reader) by modernizing the HDF5 read functions via openPMD-api, which will broaden the file support to include HDF5, ADIOS1 (BP3), ADIOS2 (BP3 and BP4), etc. and will make file handling easier. Are you interested to join us on this?

[xxirii]

Dear @ax3l,

First, I am happy this plugin will be included in the future version of VisIt.

I am aware of several bugs that could be fixed by using the openPMD-api. I think this is valuable for portability and maintainability. For instance, there is this little/big endian issue encountered by @GBlaclard.

I have unfortunately not much time to put in this plugin but I will follow the dev of the API. It may be useful for Smilei as well.

[ax3l]

Dear @xxirii,

thank you for your feedback and thoughts, and especially once again thanks for the plugin so far!

Yes, totally understandable if you are busy with other things, just want to keep you in the loop with this effort.

All the best,
Axel