Take in-situ analysis / visualization into account
There is a new library out from Kitware - Catalyst. From the homepage:
Catalyst is an open-source data analysis and visualization library designed to be tightly coupled with simulation codes. It can be directly embedded into parallel simulation codes to perform in situ analysis at run time. Catalyst leverages the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) for scalable data analysis and visualization. Furthermore, it can be coupled with the ParaView In Situ Analysis Framework to perform run-time visualization of data extracts and steering of the data analysis pipeline.
That means you can define a visualization pipeline for a simulation. Catalyst can then output VTK datasets and / or images of the visualization at specified time steps during the simulation run. Plus you can also connect the simulation to ParaView to see the visualization on the fly. It is also suited for parallel simulation codes with MPI.
The integration into the simulation code is very easy, it is simply one function call after a completed time step. But we also need to provide a converter class which generates a VTK grid from the simulation mesh, maybe this is also related to #170.
This issue is just to keep that thing in mind and is also open for discussion.