# Samrai reader error
**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506
**Category:** ParaView Support
**Created:** [March 21, 2019, 11:59pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506 "2019-03-21T23:59:32Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@kaiser](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/kaiser)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2019, 11:59pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506/1 "2019-03-21T23:59:32Z")
Hello,
I am running simulations with IBAMR, a cfd library, that outputs data in samrai format. I would like to visualize this in paraview, but am getting errors from the samrai reader.
If I load the file, the amr mesh is selected by default and if I click apply, paraview returens the following error message:
ERROR: In /Users/kitware/dashboards/buildbot-slave/8275bd07/build/superbuild/paraview/
src/Utilities/VisItBridge/databases/AvtAlgorithms/vtkAvtSTMDFileFormatAlgorithm.cxx, line 346
vtkVisItSAMRAIReader (0x6000003f3f00): Unable to find nesting information for AMR dataset
If I deselect the mesh and select a field under “cell arrays” then plot, nothing happens. The files read and plot correctly in Visit.
Do you have any suggestions as to what to try to get this to work please?
Thank you,
Alex
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### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2019, 12:24pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506/2 "2019-03-26T12:24:36Z")
Hi Alexander,
The samrai reader seems to work well with AMR data here.
Can you share your dataset ?
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### Author:  [@kaiser](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/kaiser)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2019, 3:28pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506/3 "2019-03-26T15:28:03Z")
Hi Dr. Westphal,
Yes, I would be happy to. [Here](https://www.dropbox.com/s/g4tofbygh2vcnu8/two_time_steps.zip?dl=0) is a link to two time steps at the start of the run. The first should be zeros in all fields, and the second should not.
Thank you,
Alex
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### Author:  [@kaiser](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/kaiser)
#### Post date: [April 10, 2019, 8:18pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506/4 "2019-04-10T20:18:30Z")
Hi Dr. Westphal,
Did you find anything using the files? Could you reproduce the error?
Thank you,
Alex
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### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [April 11, 2019, 8:38am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506/5 "2019-04-11T08:38:15Z")
I do reproduce the error, so either your file is not correctly formatted or it is not perfectly supported by the reader.
@berkgeveci or @utkarsh.ayachit may know.
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### Author:  [@kaiser](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/kaiser)
#### Post date: [April 12, 2019, 4:55pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506/6 "2019-04-12T16:55:07Z")
This error seems to be consistent with all samrai files that are output by IBAMR. IBAMR uses an older version of samrai, 2.4.4, could that be the issue?
Is there anything else that I could try to make it read these? Alternatively, is there any easy way to convert these samrai files to another format that is more likely to be read by paraview?
Thank you,
Alex
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### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [April 16, 2019, 9:23am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506/7 "2019-04-16T09:23:26Z")
I’m afraid this is more a question for Samrai people :
> **[FAQ](https://computation.llnl.gov/projects/samrai/faq)**
>
> What advantages does the SAMRAI framework provide?SAMRAI decouples the mesh management, parallel communication, and inter-level data management aspects of AMR from the application’s numerical kernels. It is a user extensible framework. ...
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### Author:  [@kaiser](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/kaiser)
#### Post date: [April 16, 2019, 4:32pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506/8 "2019-04-16T16:32:12Z")
I wrote to the SAMRAI team, and they said that they had not developed or tested the Paraview reader, and did not know how to diagnose the problem.
Is there anything else that could be done to diagnose why the reader might fail in this case, like some type or verbose or debug output from the reader? Or what aspect of the files could be creating the problem?
Thank you,
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### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2019, 11:05am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/samrai-reader-error/1506/9 "2019-04-29T11:05:46Z")
SAMRAI may be able to answer you about conversion to other formats.
You are welcome to open an issue on our bugtracker [https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues](https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/issues) or even to try to tackle the issue yourself.