[h5md-user] Varying particle number

[Peter Colberg]

Hi all,

For the case of varying particle number, I propose a data element
“particles/<subgroup>/particle_number” that contains the number
of particles at a given step. An “id” data element may or may not
be present. When “particle_number” is present and “id” is absent,
the particle data shall be contiguous, i.e., without holes.

The background is that I would like to store a varying subset of
indistinguishable solvent particles (~10³ of a total of 10⁶) and
efficiently retrieve the particle data for visualization.

Yea or nay?

Peter