DOE OSTI2011
VisIt is a popular open source tool for visualizing and analyzing data. It owes its success to its foci of increasing data understanding, large data support, and providing a robust and usable product, as well as its underlying design that fits today's supercomputing landscape. In this short paper, we describe the VisIt project and its accomplishments. The VisIt project's three focal points - understanding data, large data, and delivering a product - together form a powerful environment for analyzing data from HPC simulations. It is used in varied ways: it enables visualization scientists, computational code developers, and the physicists that run these codes to perform a broad range of data understanding activities, including debugging, making movies, and exploring data. The user interface portion of its design provides a powerful paradigm for analyzing data while the data processing portion of its design is well suited for big data. This in turn has led to many successes: in scaling up to high levels of concurrency and large data sizes, in providing a 'home' for large data algorithms, in understanding how to best use supercomputers, and, most importantly, in helping users understand their data. Further, despite significant upcoming changes in supercomputing architecture, VisIt's future appears bright, as it enjoys vibrant user and developer communities.
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗