[EPIC] Outputs in GEOS

Description

The purpose of this issue is to gather several stories about the outputs in GEOS.
It is an attempt to organize ideas and work to do to improve the outputs.
The overall objective is to bring value to different users of GEOS for the different applications (e.g. reservoir engineers, HPC scientists).
It is obviously open for comments.

First I would like to link back several open issues:

• #2298
• #2300
• #2289
• #2277
• #1613
• #1650
• #1636

Outputs today :

• Silo for mesh embedded data (still relevant? #1650)
• VTK for mesh embedded data
• (potentially RESQML for mesh embedded data if #2221 is validated and merged)
• HDF5 for everything else
• Shall we consider the current logging functions as outputs ?

Outputs of data that can be embedded on mesh cells is covered but what about other data ?

Work Scope

I think the subject can be split into two steps:

1. Gathering information to output

• understand how does pack/unpack works (essentially for me)
  • https://github.com/GEOSX/GEOS/pull/2369
• what kind of users ? (e.g. reservoir engineers, numerical engineers)
• what are the needed information on the output (e.g. on wells and regions, linear systems) (user interview)
  • Computation of the well bhp as a function of time,
  • Computation of the average temperature of a region as a function of time,
  • Computation of linear iterations as a function of time.
  • Computation of mean pressure as a function of time.
  • What are yours ?

2. Extract the information

• where: writing in a file (e.g. hdf5), standard output, send in a stream, etc
• how: structured pattern ? (e.g. some kind of serialization)
• with what: external library ?

Issues in this EPIC