VizWorld.com

My Favorite visualization tool ParaView has just hit v3.12, adding in new client-server communication code, better plugin support, and (what I think is the neatest feature) Streaming Visuals.

ParaView 3.12.0 includes updates to the streaming framework at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL). The multi-resolution streaming view now automatically adjusts resolution to match the projected image size. Moreover, VTK filters can now modify meta-information, so they can modify the data while still allowing the streaming framework to cull and prioritize pieces.

I’ve been watching this feature steadily for the last 2 years or so, and I’m so excited that it’s finally come to the main distribution!  Go download it now!

via Kitware – News: ParaView 3.12.0 is Now Available!.

Science kitware, paraview, software

If you’ve always wanted to know more about VTK or Paraview but haven’t had the time, or haven’t been able to convince your management to spring for paid training, Kitware has heard your complaints.

Kitware is pleased to announce the availability of free online courses in support of its open-source communities. The courses, designed to give new and beginning users the skills and knowledge required to effectively use these open-source tools, will provide an introduction to the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), CMake, ParaView, and the Insight Toolkit (ITK). Each 90-minute course will cover one toolkit and be taught by an expert Kitware instructor.

You can hit their Training website and see the “Upcoming Online Courses” to see the list.  They’ll be offering at first one class a month, with the first “Intro to VTK” coming up on October 12th.

via Kitware – News: Free Online Courses Now Available.

Science education, kitware, paraview, training, vtk

In just a few weeks, the CINECA supercomputing centre in Bologna, Italy will be hosting a Workshop on Visualization of Large Scientific Data.

The scientific community is presently witnessing an unprecedented growth in the quality and quantity of data coming from simulations and real-world experiments. Moreover writing results of numerical simulations to disk files has long been a bottleneck in high-performance computing. To access effectively and extract the scientific content of such large-scale data sets (often sizes are measured in hundreds or even millions of Gigabytes) appropriate tools and techniques are needed. In-situ visualization libraries enable the user to connect directly to a running simulation, examine the data, do numerical queries and create graphical output while the simulation executes. It addresses the need of extreme scale simulation, eschewing the need to write data to disk. The workshop will bring together researchers, developers, computational scientists for cross-training and to discuss recent developments and future advancements in remote and in-situ visualization

I see that staff from Kitware (VTK, ParaView) will be there, and it seems they’ll be talking a lot about VisIt as well.  Both fabulous tools, but I find it interesting that CEI/Ensight isn’t mentioned anywhere…

via Workshop on Visualization of Large Scientific Data | Cineca.

Science cineca, conference, paraview, visit, workshop

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.

Science kitware, nasa, paraview

Kitware has just announced the immediate availability of ParaView 3.10, boasting a huge new collection of features.  For starters:

For the 3.10 release,  we have added 60 new readers, which include: ANSYS, CGNS, Chombo, Dyna3D, Enzo, Mili, Miranda, Nastran, Pixie, Samrai, Silo, and Tecplot Binary. A full listing of supported readers can be found in the ParaView Users Guide. We also added the ability for developers to create ParaView reader plugins from previously developed VisIt reader plugins. You can find a full guide on how to do this on the VisIt Database Bridge.

After that, they have a new Python-based calculator:

We have included a Python-based calculator which makes it possible to write operations using Python. The Python calculator uses NumPy, which lets you use advanced functions such as gradients, curls, and divergence easily in expressions. Also the NumPy module is packaged in the ParaView binary and is importable from the ParaView Python shell.

But that’s not all.  They’ve got a new parallel-standalone version, great for folks on beefy workstations, along with new menus, smarter filters, and a new pipeline for composite and multi-block datasets.

A huge collection of new features, all available for free right now!

via Kitware – News: ParaView 3.10.0 Now Available.

Science kitware, paraview, software

HPC News site HPCWire has released their 2010 Reader’s Choice awards and Kitware brings home 2 of them for their fantastic Paraview product.  With both the Reader’s Choice and Editor’s Choice for Best Visualization Product or Technology, they’ve proven just how popular the open-source tool ParaView is.

“HPCwire readers are among the most informed in the HPC community and these awards represent which HPC-related companies are making the biggest impacts in mind-share within this community, said Tom Tabor, publisher of HPCwire. “The HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards send a strong message to the recipients that those in the global HPC community recognize their work, and consider their efforts meritorious…Kitware is honored to accept these awards on behalf of the global ParaView community that has made ParaView the success it is today.

via Kitware Receives Honors in 2010 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards.

Science award, kitware, paraview

This is a “public service announcement” for anyone playing with the IEEE VisWeek 2011 Vis Contest dataset we mentioned here.  After a few days of patiently waiting for one of the four three massive 30-40GB datasets to download, I managed to finish it.  So some notes for anyone interested:

• I used the SAS dataset, a 32GB Tarball that expands to 143G on disk.
• ParaView will load the data just fine. Used 3.6.2.  Took up less than 2GB of Ram to create the image shown above.
• The files are ASCII.  I saved them as VTM’s (Binary) using ParaView, and the result is 500Meg on disk.

Enjoy.  If you come up with any other useful information, feel free to send it to me or put it in the comments.

Science contest, paraview, visweek

The latest RCE Podcast talks to Kitware’s Dr. Berk Geveci, Dr. Kenneth Moreland, and Utkarsh Ayachit about ParaView.  They’ve done some nice visualization podcasts including one on VisIt, one on VTK, and another on IceT.  For folks who use ParaView regularly, you probably won’t get much out of it except attaching some personality and voices to those names you see floating around on the Mailing Lists all the time, but for novices it’s a great introduction to one of my favorite visualization tools.

RCE 41: ParaView Parallel Visualization | Podcast – RCE an HPC Podcast.

Science paraview, Podcast

Last week we were able to interview Berk Geveci, Kitware’s Director of Scientfic Computing, about Kitware’s dedication to open source computing and their popular VTK and ParaView products.  Berk now leads a team of 18-20 people focused on high performance computing scientific visualization and, more recently, informatics and information visualization.

Kitware is approximately 12 years old, and started as a research company around the Visualization Toolkit (VTK).  The business model is founded on supporting and consulting on open-source software, tho now they have 5 differenct groups on various interests.  Berk runs the Scientific visualization group, but they also have groups on computer vision, medical imaging and computing, data publication, and software processes like CMake and CDash.

During the course of the interview we discussed how Kitware deals with open-source and proprietary technologies, their government and industry collaborations, and what we might see in the next version of these popular products.

Read the interview after the break.

Read more…

Science feature, interview, kitware, paraview, vtk

Boston University is running a free week-long tutorial series on Scientific Visualization and High Performance Scientific Computing that includes introductions to Scientific Visualization and training on tools like ParaView and VTK.

In addition to covering concepts, techniques, and tools which researchers may use in their own computing environments, these tutorials are designed to help you make effective use of the Boston University Scientific Computing Facility and its related scientific visualization resources.

Full details are available on their site, but most of the SciVis tutorials are today and tomorrow.

via Scientific Computing and Visualization Summer Tutorial Series » TechWeb » Boston University.

Science education, paraview, tutorials, vtk