Re: parallel visualization software

Hi

I found this package a few weeks ago and I have been testing it in the
last week.

I think it is really great and we should really see if we can use it for
BASIN!

The design is very similar to that of BASIN. My understanding is that it
connects to a remote parallel machine (if you want to use a remote
parallel machine; you don't need to do that) the same way we do it in
BASIN (via ssh). It allows you to create your own computational modules
for operations on variables.
You can use it from Python, C++ or from a GUI.
The plotting functionalities are great: all the kind of plots you can
think of (particles, 2d ,3d, isosurfaces etc.) are available. It allows to
visualize and do
different operations on different subsets of data. Animations are also
supported (although I have not tested this yet).

As far as extending the modules they provided with external modules (the
external modules being BASIN, should we decide to try to put BASIN and
Visit together), the manuals provided do not describe how to
do that and we need to contact them to get the Guide to do this.

It support several data format but if the data format you are interested
in is not one of those you can extend the package by adding the
approriate reader for your own data format.

So far I have tested most plotting functionalities and part of the
operations you can do on data. I need to look at how to do animations and
extend the package with external modules (but as I said I need another
manual not available online for that).

I'll let you know how it goes.

Enrico

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Michael S. Vogeley wrote:

> 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
> ****************************************************************
>
Received on Tue Oct 25 11:37:42 2005