CM1tools (formerly HDFtools)

CM1tools is a collection of code which reads from George Bryan's CM1 model that is configured to use Leigh Orf's hdf5 file output format. As of May 2013, the hdf5 output option that works with these tools is not publicly availble in the CM1 distribution; the hdf5 output option in the distributed version of CM1 is not compatible with these tools. To request the modified version of the cm1 code, send an email to Leigh Orf, the owner of the cm1tools project.

The current tools convert the HDF5 output to other formats, such as netcdf and vis5d. In addition, a plugin to the VisIt visualzation tool has been written and works with the HDF5 model output. All of the tools together were written over the years by Leigh Orf out of necessity as part of his research on high resolution thunderstorms.

The code in CM1 and used to read the hdf5 format described in the whitepaper found below could be applied towards any fluid dynamics type code. The benefits of the approach used here are really only felt for very large simulations on hundreds to hundreds of thousands of MPI ranks. If you are just using CM1 on a server or workstation, the netcdf option would be perfectly adequate and there would really be no benefit to using cm1tools.

A whitepaper describing the approach being used in the modified version of CM1 can be found here.
The CM1 model can be found here.
If you are using CM1 on a supercomputer and wish to acquire the code that outputs the file format that is read by the code on sourceforge, please send me an email. As of this writing (May 2013), the modified CM1 code was stable but was designed to work on specific problems by my research group and was not written for general use. I just don't have the time to provide support to any user; I am more inclined to help out if there is the potential for a mutually beneficial collaboration.

This code and the modified CM1 code would only be useful to researchers doing high-resolution cloud modeling. If you are one of these people and have found this site, and wish to use these tools, send me an email.

Note, that the name of the tarball on the sourceforge site is "cm1visit" - this is because the underlying tools that deal with the HDF5 output were developed first (they are found in a subdirectory) and the visit plugin was built on top of those tools, and that code is in the top level directory.

If you'd like to learn more about the work I'm doing as well as see some of the visualizations involving the use of these tools, see my research page.