I investigated a bit more with some dummy examples and now I understand the mapping of the vtkGhostType array to the nodes/cells and how the communication can be set up between processors.
But I still don’t know why those arrays always have additional 8 bytes with zero values in it. Has someone an idea?
The last thing that I have to mention is that in the documentation (see first post) I can find the sentence:
Each DataArray ’s data are stored contiguously and appended immediately after the previous DataArray ’s data without a seperator.
But in fact I found several additional bytes, that don’t act as a separator but that has nothing to do with the data, that has to be displayed.
That is also true for the beginning of the raw block. It says
The DataArray ’s offset attribute indicates the file position offset from the first character after the underscore to the beginning its data.
I had a paraview-generated file where this was true and I had a file where I found some disturbing bytes between the actual data and the underscore.