- since ensight format is always float and also always written
component-wise, perform the double -> float narrowing when
extracting the components. This reduces the amount of data
transferred between processors.
ENH: avoid vtk/ensight parallel communication of empty messages
- since ensight writes by element type (eg, tet, hex, polyhedral) the
individual written field sections will tend to be relatively sparse.
Skip zero-size messages, which should help reduce some of the
synchronization bottlenecks.
ENH: use 'data chunking' when writing ensight files in parallel
- since ensight fields are written on a per-element basis, the
corresponding segment can become rather sparsely distributed. With
'data chunking', we attempt to get as many send/recv messages in
before flushing the buffer for writing. This should make the
sequential send/recv less affected by the IO time.
ENH: allow use of an external buffer when writing ensight components
STYLE: remove last vestiges of autoPtr<ensightFile> for output routines