VisIt
This article contains content that is written like an advertisement. (July 2018) |
Developer(s) | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory |
---|---|
Stable release | |
Written in | Interactive visualization |
License | BSD |
Website | [1] |
VisIt is an open-source interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on 2D and 3D structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle big data set sizes in the terascale range and small data sets in the kilobyte range.[3]
History
VisIt was developed by the Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative (ASCI) to visualize and analyze the results of terascale simulations. It was developed as a framework for adding custom capabilities and rapidly deploying new visualization technologies. After an initial prototype effort, work on VisIt began in the summer of 2000, and the initial version of VisIt was released in the fall of 2002. Although the primary driving force behind the development of VisIt was for visualizing extremely large data, it is also well suited for visualizing data from typical simulations on desktop systems. Because of its applicability beyond visualizing terascale data, VisIt is made freely available. In 2005 it won an R&D 100 Award.[4][5]
VisIt is now supported by the DOE's SciDAC (Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing)[6] program to assist with analysis and visualization of the large datasets generated by open scientific computing. As such, it is now developed in part by many organizations, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California, Davis, among others. Since VisIt is open source and released under the BSD license, many others have made contributions as well.
Summary
VisIt is an open source, turnkey application for large scale simulated and experimental data sets. Its charter goes beyond pretty pictures; the application is an infrastructure for parallelized, general post-processing of extremely massive data sets. Target use cases include data exploration, comparative analysis, visual debugging, quantitative analysis, and presentation graphics.
The VisIt product delivers the efforts of many software developers in a single package. First, VisIt leverages several third party libraries: the
The basic design is a client–server model, where the server is parallelized. The client–server aspect allows for effective visualization in a remote setting, while the parallelization of the server allows for the largest data sets to be processed reasonably interactively. The tool has been used to visualize many large data sets, including a twenty seven billion data point structured grid, a one billion point particle simulation, and
VisIt follows a
The VisIt project originated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program of the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Agency, but it has gone on to become a distributed project being developed by several groups. Major hubs for the project come from:
- VACET,[7] a center for enabling technologies from DOE's SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing) program from its Office of Science,
- from ASC, and
- from GNEP(the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership from the DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy).
The project has twenty developers from many organizations and universities, including five DOE Laboratories. VisIt received an R&D 100 Award in 2005 and is downloaded approximately twenty five thousand times per year.
Features
- Has rich feature set for scalar, vector, and tensor field visualization. VisIt handles 2D and 3D data equally well. VisIt also has the ability to animate data, allowing users to see the time evolution of their data.
- Provides qualitative and quantitative velocity field, it is possible to define a new field that is the velocity magnitude. It also supports a generalized query interface, which allows you to query derived quantities such as volume or surface area.
- Supports multiple mesh types. VisIt provides support for a wide range of computational meshes, including two- and three-dimensional point, meshes.
- Powerful, full-featured rotateobjects interactively using the mouse. It also gives users the ability to interactively size and position geometric objects such as planes and spheres.
- Parallel and distributed architecture. VisIt employs a distributed and parallel architecture in order to handle extremely large data sets interactively. VisIt's rendering and data processing capabilities are split into viewer and engine components that may be distributed across multiple machines:
- Viewer is responsible for graphics cards.
- Engine is responsible for the bulk of the data processing and seriallyon a single processor or in parallel on thousands of processors.
- Viewer is responsible for
- Interfaces with regression suites.
- Extensible with dynamically loaded run-timefrom the plugin directory. New plugins can be added simply by installing them in this directory. VisIt comes with a graphical plugin creation tool, which greatly simplifies the process of creating new plugins.
- Plans for upcoming releases are available to view.