A mesh and field I/O library and scientific database

Silo is a library for reading and writing a wide variety of scientific 
data to binary, disk files. The files Silo produces and the data within 
them can be easily shared and exchanged between wholly independently 
developed applications running on disparate computing platforms. 

Consequently, Silo facilitates the development of general purpose tools 
for processing scientific data. One of the more popular tools that process 
Silo data files is the VisIt visualization tool.

Silo supports gridless (point) meshes, structured meshes, unstructured-zoo 
and unstructured-arbitrary-polyhedral meshes, block structured AMR meshes, 
constructive solid geometry (CSG) meshes, piecewise-constant (e.g. 
zone-centered) and piecewise-linear (e.g. node-centered) variables defined 
on the node, edge, face or volume elements of meshes as well as the 
decomposition of meshes into arbitrary subset hierarchies including 
materials and mixing materials. In addition, Silo supports a wide variety 
of other useful objects to address various scientific computing 
application needs.Although the Silo library is a serial library, it has 
some key features which enable it to be applied quite effectively and 
scalably in parallel.

WWW: https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/silo/