If you love ParaView and VTK, then you should definitely look at this newest press release from Kitware which discusses their recent SBIR win to develop some new features for massive parallelization, for use by NASA.
In this investigative phase Kitware will identify scaling bottlenecks in ParaView, an open-source visualization application currently used by NASA to explore the results of trillion element particle simulations on the Pleiades supercomputer. As the number of processors scales up past ten thousand, Kitware anticipates that the most critical issues will be data IO, architectural overhead, and how to composite of the partial results. Although the Phase I effort of this project is limited to developing prototypes and selecting a solution, if the Phase II effort is funded these improvements will be incorporated into ParaView and the underlying Visualization Toolkit (VTK) which will benefit tens of thousands of researchers world-wide.
Paraview already works surprisingly well on large-problems, but the 100,000 core runs their mentioning are problematic for any piece of software. I can’t wait to see what they add!
via Kitware Wins NASA Contract to Develop Open-Source Scientific Visualization Software.
