Limitations of Ensight data format?

ParaView Support
1

Hello,

I am trying to visualize a large structured 3d mesh dataset that is in Ensight format. The Ensight Gold manual says that it supports a max of 2 billion elements per part and 2 billion nodes per part.

Bisecting the size of a structured mesh that causes the reader to crash, I’ve found that when the total number of TUPLES necessary to describe the structured mesh crosses 2^31 (i.e. # nodes crosses 715 million in change) triggers failure rather than # nodes…

There’s no way to lift the limitation of 2G coordinates in an Ensight geometry file because it specifies a signed int32 for # nodes and # elements (ugh), but if I can dig through vtkPEnSightGoldBinaryReader.cxx and find the int32s that are causing this problem and alleviate it, will PV itself be okay with vtkPEnSightGoldBinaryReader::CreateStructuredGridOutput returning a grid larger than 715M cells?

Thanks,
Erik

2

I have resolved the problem & submitted an issue+patch on GitLab that alleviates the 715M limit. It was just the use of int32s in computing offsets inside the reader class.