parallel visualization software

See http://www.llnl.gov/visit/about.html

A student here at Princeton found this and we're looking at using this
for visualizing SDSS data. I'll report on it's usefullness. This
approach may clash with NCSA design, but it's good to know what's out there.

Note the following from their web page:

Open-source code
VisIt's code is open source, allowing programmers to read, redistribute,
and modify the source code.

VisIt’s rendering and data processing capabilities are split into viewer
and engine components that may be distributed across multiple machines:

     * Viewer—Responsible for rendering and is typically run on a local
desktop or visualization server so that it can leverage the extremely
powerful graphics cards that have been developed in the last few years.
     * Engine—Responsible for the bulk of the data processing and
input/output (I/O) and is typically run on a remote machine where the
data is located. This eliminates the need move the data and makes
high-end compute and I/O resources available to it. The engine can be
run serially on a single processor or in parallel on thousands of
processors.

Python scripting interface gives users the ability to batch process data
using a powerful scripting language. This feature can be used to create
extremely sophisticated animations or implement regression suites. It
also allows simulation systems that use Python as a back-plane to easily
integrate visualization capabilities into their systems.

****************************************************************
Michael S. Vogeley

Current address (until September 2006):
Department of Astrophysical Sciences
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1001
Phone: (609)258-6301 Fax: (609)258-1020
Email: vogeley@princeton.edu

Permanent address:
Department of Physics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Phone: (215)895-2710 FAX: (215)895-5934
Email: vogeley@drexel.edu Web: www.physics.drexel.edu
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Received on Tue Oct 25 09:41:00 2005