Silo is a computer data format

File format

A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file.Since a disk drive, or indeed any computer storage, can store only bits, the computer must have some way of converting information to 0s and 1s and vice-versa. There are different kinds of formats for...

 and library developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , just outside Livermore, California, is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center founded by the University of California in 1952...

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

Polygon mesh

A polygon mesh or unstructured grid is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that defines the shape of a polyhedral object in 3D computer graphics and solid modeling...

 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

Adaptive mesh refinement

In numerical analysis, adaptive mesh refinement is a method of adaptive meshing. Central to any Eulerian method is the manner in which it discretizes the continuous domain of interest into a grid of many individual elements...

 (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

NetCDF 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 program at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research...

, and HDF5.

Currently, VisIt

VisIt

VisIt is an open source interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on 2D and 3D structured and unstructured meshes...

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

Scientific visualization

Scientific visualization is an interdisciplinary branch of science according to Friendly "primarily concerned with the visualization of three-dimensional phenomena , where the emphasis is on realistic renderings of volumes, surfaces, illumination sources, and so forth, perhaps...

and analysis, among many other formats.

The Silo manual is available in PDF format. Source code for Silo is available for download.

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.