Controlling What’s in the PlotFile

There are a few options that can be set at runtime to control what variables appear in the plotfile. See section Plotfiles.

Amrvis

Amrvis is a package developed by CCSE that is designed specifically for highly efficient visualization of block-structured hierarchical AMR data. Information on building the amrvis2d and amrvis3d executables is given in section Visualizing the Results. A very useful feature of Amrvis is View \(\rightarrow\) Dataset, which allows you to actually view the numbers in a spreadsheet that is nested to reflect the AMR hierarchy – this can be handy for debugging. You can modify how many levels of data you want to see, whether you want to see the grid boxes or not, what palette you use, etc.

If you like to have amrvis display a certain variable, at a certain scale, when you first bring up each plotfile (you can always change it once the amrvis window is open), you can modify the amrvis.defaults file in your directory to have amrvis default to these settings every time you run it. The Amrvis repository has a sample amrvis.defaults file that can be copied to your local folder and modified.

VisIt

VisIt reads AMReX plotfiles, including IAMR’s, natively. Open the Header file inside the plotfile directory (e.g. plt00000/Header) with “File” \(\rightarrow\) “Open file”; VisIt picks its Boxlib reader for it automatically. See the VisIt section of AMReX’s documentation for a worked example, and https://visit-dav.github.io/visit-website/ for VisIt itself.

yt

yt (https://yt-project.org) is an open-source Python package for analyzing and visualizing simulation data, and it reads IAMR plotfiles directly; IAMR’s fields appear under the "boxlib" field type, e.g. ("boxlib", "density"). Install it with python -m pip install yt. For how to use it with AMReX plotfiles, see the yt section of AMReX’s documentation and the AMReX section of yt’s guide to loading data.