Silo (library)

Last updated
Silo
Filename extension
.silo
Developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Latest release
4.11.1
September 13, 2023
Type of format scientific data format
Website wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/silo

Silo is a computer data format and library developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for storing rectilinear, curvilinear, unstructured, or point meshes 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 (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, and HDF5.

Currently, VisIt, an open source software package with its start at LLNL, supports the Silo format for visualization 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.

Related Research Articles

Berkeley DB (BDB) is an embedded database software library for key/value data, historically significant in open source software. Berkeley DB is written in C with API bindings for many other programming languages. BDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays, and supports multiple data items for a single key. Berkeley DB is not a relational database, although it has database features including database transactions, multiversion concurrency control and write-ahead logging. BDB runs on a wide variety of operating systems including most Unix-like and Windows systems, and real-time operating systems.

gzip GNU file compression/decompression tool

gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and intended for use by GNU. Version 0.1 was first publicly released on 31 October 1992, and version 1.0 followed in February 1993.

In computing, Deflate is a lossless data compression file format that uses a combination of LZ77 and Huffman coding. It was designed by Phil Katz, for version 2 of his PKZIP archiving tool. Deflate was later specified in RFC 1951 (1996).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FLAC</span> Lossless digital audio coding format

FLAC is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data.

Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It was developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container.

OpenEXR is a high-dynamic range, multi-channel raster file format, released as an open standard along with a set of software tools created by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), under a free software license similar to the BSD license.

Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Lossless data compression does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as Advanced Audio Coding, MP3, Vorbis, and Opus. Therefore, it may be decompressed to a file that is identical to the source material.

RAR is a proprietary archive file format that supports data compression, error correction and file spanning. It was developed in 1993 by Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal and the software is licensed by win.rar GmbH. The name RAR stands for Roshal Archive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">7-Zip</span> Open-source file archiver

7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own archive format called 7z, but can read and write several others.

WavPack is a free and open-source lossless audio compression format and application implementing the format. It is unique in the way that it supports hybrid audio compression alongside normal compression which is similar to how FLAC works. It also supports compressing a wide variety of lossless formats, including various variants of PCM and also DSD as used in SACDs, together with its support for surround audio.

Lempel–Ziv–Oberhumer (LZO) is a lossless data compression algorithm that is focused on decompression speed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Cascade Technology</span> Open-source 3D modelling software

Open Cascade Technology (OCCT), formerly called CAS.CADE, is an open-source software development platform for 3D CAD, CAM, CAE, etc. that is developed and supported by Open Cascade SAS company.

JPEG XR is an image compression standard for continuous tone photographic images, based on the HD Photo specifications that Microsoft originally developed and patented. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, and is the preferred image format for Ecma-388 Open XML Paper Specification documents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PeaZip</span> File archive computer program

PeaZip is a free and open-source file manager and file archiver for Microsoft Windows, ReactOS, Linux, MacOS and BSD by Giorgio Tani. It supports its native PEA archive format and other mainstream formats, with special focus on handling open formats. Version 9.4.0 supported 234 file extensions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VP8</span> Open and royalty-free video coding format released by Google in 2010

VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.

XZ Utils is a set of free software command-line lossless data compressors, including the programs lzma and xz, for Unix-like operating systems and, from version 5.0 onwards, Microsoft Windows. For compression/decompression the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) is used. XZ Utils started as a Unix port of Igor Pavlov's LZMA-SDK that has been adapted to fit seamlessly into Unix environments and their usual structure and behavior.

LZ4 is a lossless data compression algorithm that is focused on compression and decompression speed. It belongs to the LZ77 family of byte-oriented compression schemes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenZFS</span> Open-source implementation of the ZFS file system

OpenZFS is an open-source implementation of the ZFS file system and volume manager initially developed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris operating system and now maintained by the OpenZFS Project. It supports features like data compression, data deduplication, copy-on-write clones, snapshots, and RAID-Z. It also supports the creation of virtual devices, which allows for the creation of file systems that span multiple disks.

JPEG XL is a royalty-free raster-graphics file format that supports both lossy and lossless compression. It is designed to outperform existing raster formats and thus become their universal replacement.

References