MESAHub / MESAHub/mesa

Add options for HDF5 history and profile output

Open
#748 4 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
Fortran
Stars
249
Forks
82
Avg merge
1d 3h
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

History and profiles are the basic output types for all MESA models, and HDF5 options for these would enable storing data far more efficiently. I imagine many users have existing workflows that would be disrupted, so we would likely want to continue to support the current plain text output files as default, at least initially. We could start by hiding an HDF5 option for this output behind an inlist flag that defaults to false.
```
use_hdf5_for_output_data = .false.
```
We would also likely want to distribute lightweight python tooling analogous to `py_mesa_reader` so that users can easily load their MESA output into python analysis scripts for postprocessing. The goal should be to make this seamless enough that the average user running models and making plots with python doesn't have to think at all about the underlying HDF5 format of the data.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

No source files or tests are named. Start by locating the history and profile output entry points, the inlist option handling, and any existing py_mesa_reader tooling. Done would require a decided HDF5 design, a default-off use_hdf5_for_output_data option that preserves plain-text output, and usable Python loading support.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
fortran, python
Domain
data, tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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