Silo is a computer data format and

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

developed at

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

(LLNL) for storing rectilinear, curvilinear, unstructured, or point

meshes A mesh is a barrier made of connected strands of metal, fiber, or other flexible or ductile materials. A mesh is similar to a web or a net in that it has many attached or woven strands. Types * A plastic mesh may be extruded, oriented, ex ...

in 2D and 3D. It supports data upon those meshes, including scalar, vector, and tensor variables; volume fraction-based materials; and mass fraction-based species. It fully supports block structured

adaptive mesh refinement In numerical analysis, adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is a method of adapting the accuracy of a solution within certain sensitive or turbulent regions of simulation, dynamically and during the time the solution is being calculated. When solutions ...

(AMR) meshes by way of mesh blocks structured in a hierarchy. Silo sits on top of other low-level storage libraries such as PDB,

NetCDF NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) is a set of software libraries and self-describing, machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data. The project homepage is hosted by the Unidata ...

, and

HDF5 Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) is a set of file formats (HDF4, HDF5) designed to store and organize large amounts of data. Originally developed at the U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications, it is supported by The HDF Group, a non-p ...

. Currently,

VisIt Visit refer as go to see and spend time with socially. Visit may refer to: *State visit, a formal visit by a head of state to a foreign country *Conjugal visit, in which a prisoner is permitted to spend several hours or days in private with a visit ...

, an

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

package with its start at LLNL, supports the Silo format for

visualization Visualization or visualisation may refer to: *Visualization (graphics), the physical or imagining creation of images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message * Data visualization, the graphic representation of data * Information visualiz ...

and analysis, among many other formats. As of Version 4.8, July, 2010, the Silo source code is now available under the standard BSD Open Source License. The source code for two compression libraries which have been part of previous releases of the Silo library is not available under the terms of the BSD Open Source license. These are the Hzip and FPzip compression libraries. For this reason, two different releases of the Silo source code are made available.

References

Numerical software Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory {{compu-library-stub