Over the last decades the finite element (FE) method has become the mainstay of modern numerical analysis for solving partial differential equations in many fields of science and eningeering. While the size of the problems has grown from humble beginnings from a few throusand element to millions, increasingly, parallel computers are used to solve the linear and non-linear systems of equations from the FE discretization. Simultaneously, the amount of data resulting from these calculations has grown accordingly and a myriad of different storage formats has been created, hindering distribution of results and data exchange between different codes.
We have therefore defined the open, scalable and completely transparent standard H5Fed for storing FE data on the basis of the HDF5 data storage library to remedy this problem. H5Fed offers an application programming interface (API) to read and write hierarchically structured tetrahedral meshes, to select a specific level in the mesh hierarchy, both on serial and parallel computers. The API is simple and can easily be integrated into existing codes.
H5Fed also provides adjacency relations for all topological entities of a tetrahedral mesh, both upward and downward. For example, a vertex can be queried for all tetrahedra connected to it, or a face of a tetrahedron knows its edges and vertices.
In this talk we give an overview of the standard, explain the motivation for its definition and comment on the current status. The implementation of H5Fed is work in progress.