Large Data Vis News

Kitware Recognized in 2011 HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has been recognized in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editor’s Choice Awards, recently presented at the 2011 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC ‘11), in Seattle, Washington.

Recognized in the Editor's Choice category, the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) received the award for best HPC visualization product or technology. HPCwire also recognized Kitware’s ParaView, an open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization application, in 2010 with both the Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards.

The HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards are determined through online polling of the global HPCwire audience, while the Editors’ Choice Awards are selected by a panel of HPCwire editors and industry leaders. Both awards are announced annually at the Supercomputing Conference.

"HPCwire readers are regarded as amongst the most discerning in the HPC community, and these awards represent w

ParaView 3.12.0 is Now Available!

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware and the ParaView team are pleased to announce the availability of the final ParaView 3.12.0 binaries for download on the ParaView download page. This release features improvements to the ParaView ServerManager and includes more than 190 resolved issues, all of which can be found in the change-log. An updated user guide for 3.12.0 can also be found on the ParaView wiki.

ParaView 3.12.0 includes improvements to the underpinnings of the ParaView ServerManager. The communication layer beneath the ServerManager was upgraded to minimize communication, while making it easier to debug and trace messages exchanged be

Students' VTK Google Summer of Code Projects Completed

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Visualization Toolkit participated for the first time this year in the Google Summer of Code program as a mentoring organization. This program is an exciting way for students to get involved in open source while being funded by Google to “flip bits not burgers.” Marcus Hanwell, a former Google Summer of Code student participant, acted as the VTK organization’s administrator and mentor, with Jeff Baumes as the backup administrator and mentor.

VTK was given two student slots as a new mentoring organization, which made it especially difficult to select from all of the high-quality proposals received. After a great deal of deliberation, David Lonie’s proposal entitled “Chemistry Visualization” and Tharindu De Silva’s proposal entitled “Implement Select Algorithms from IEEE VisWeek 2010 in VTK” were selected. We were pleased to see both of the students engaging the developer community and using the to

Kitware Welcomes New Team Members in September

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

In September, Kitware welcomed four new team members and a year-long intern. Megha Pandey and Eric Smith joined the computer vision team, Sankhesh Jhaveri joined the scientific computing team, and Brenda McCormack joined the contracting team. Michael Jeulin-LaGarrigue will be with Kitware for a year while interning with the medical team.

Megha Pandey joined the computer vision group in the Clifton Park office. She holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a dual B.Tech and M.Tech in electrical engineering and communication and signal processing from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay. Ms. Pandey has research experience from UNC and IIT, Bombay, where she worked on a number of notable projects including indoor scene classification, vision-based marker-less motion capture, moving object segmentation, and an RFID system with

VTK 5.8.0 Released

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware and the VTK team are pleased to announce the release of VTK 5.8.0, a major release containing several noteworthy additions and enhancements.

There are numerous improvements to the Python wrappers including the addition of many classes, methods, and constants that were not previously wrapped, along with support for unicode strings arguments, two-dimensional array arguments, pass-by-reference, and default argument values. As part of the wrapper improvement effort, the code for the wrappers has been reorganized and structured to make it easier to expand and maintain.

VTK charts have been updated to make use of the 2D scene with new text rendering and improved OpenGL rendering routines. New chart types such as pie charts and 2D histograms have been added. There are also improvements to the scatter and parallel

Kitware Awarded DOE Funding to Develop Climate Change Analysis Tool

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded Kitware SBIR funding to develop an analysis tool with easy, simplified access to computer model outputs resulting from long-term climate change projections performed by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

The application, ClimatePipes, will facilitate access to data for non-researchers, as opposed to a more technical audience. Kitware believes that effective analysis in climate science relies on having the appropriate cyberinfrastructure to enable people to discover, access, manipulate, and visualize large and complex datasets of interest. Facilitating widespread accessibility of this data can have a significant impact on commercial, educational, and government activities.

In Phase I of this project, Kitware will create a prototype application that demonstrates simple data access and manipulation, and basic analysis, visualization, and data provenance.

"ClimatePipes will provide access to data that can have a real impact

Kitware Team Grows in July

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomed five new employees and one intern in July. Matthew Dawkins, Paul Tunison, and Nick Sullivan joined the computer vision group. Chris Harris joined the scientific visualization team, and Matthew McCormick joined the medical team. Benjamin Long is an intern who will be working on MIDAS for the next year.

Matthew Dawkins joined the computer vision team as an R&D engineer at the Clifton Park office. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He has previous experience as an intern for Digital Receiver Technology, a Boeing subsidiary, where he assisted in the development of embedded software applications for the protocol engineering department.

Paul Tunison started with Kitware in November 2010 as a computer vision

MIDASDesktop 1.8.2 Released

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of MIDASDesktop 1.8.2. MIDAS Desktop is a client-side GUI application for synchronizing data and metadata between a user's local filesystem and a MIDAS server. It also manages, searches, and organizes datasets in both the client and server datastores.

A major update included in this release is that MIDASDesktop and MIDAScli are now built as application wrapping libraries that are part of the Common Toolkit (CTK). By porting much of the bulk of MIDASDesktop’s functionality into CTK, older library dependencies were replaced with better functionality such as that which exists within Qt. These changes will allow users to pause and resume file uploads and downloads, and also push selected subtrees of their data using drag and drop. The default directory has also

Kitware Continues to Grow in June

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomed three new full-time employees and five interns throughout the month of June. Ilknur Kabul and Joe Snyder joined the medical team, Kyle Lutz joined the scientific visualization team, and five additional interns have joined Kitware for the summer.

Ilknur Kabul joined Kitware as a member of the medical team at the Carrboro office. She is completing her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and holds a master’s degree from Bilkent University, and a bachelor’s degree from Middle East Technical University. Prior to joining Kitware, Ilknur worked as a research assistant for Medical Image Display and Analysis Group (MIDAG), where she researched illustrative rendering techniques for medical imaging and developed model-based texture synthesis approaches for generating anatomical surface and volumetric textures.

Phase I effort focused on resolving bottlenecks in ultrascale visualization to support interactive exploration of massive datasets

NASA has awarded Kitware SBIR funding to develop an advanced visualization software solution to address the challenge of analyzing and obtaining insight from massive datasets. While the scientists producing these large datasets are accustomed to running batch jobs to perform visualization, scientific discovery is greatly enhanced by interactive exploration of the data. The software will address critical issues in ultrascale visualization in order to enable real-time investigation of these extremely large datasets using massi

ParaView 3.10.0 Now Available

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The ParaView team is pleased to announce the availability of the ParaView 3.10.0 final binaries for download on the ParaView download page. The ParaView 3.10.0 release features several notable new features and improvements, described below. For an exhaustive list of the new features and bug-fixes, please refer to the change log at: http://www.paraview.org/Bug/changelog_page.php.

In January, Kitware hired George Zagaris as an R&D engineer for the Scientific Computing group. He is working on the development of advanced algorithms and software infrastructure within ParaView and VTK to efficiently and robustly process and visualize large-scale distributed Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) datasets.

Prior to joining Kitware, George was working as a research programmer and developed an advanced toolkit for parallel overset grid assembly targeting unsteady, time-dependent, moving body aerodynamic simulations. He earn

ActiViz released as free and open-source software

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has announced that ActiViz, a commercial .NET wrapper for VTK, will now be available free and open source under a BSD license.

The unique ActiViz tool is used for generating C# wrappers around Kitware's Visualization Toolkit (VTK). VTK, which has been under development for more than 15 years, is an object-oriented C++ toolkit for advanced visualization and data processing used by thousands of researchers and software developers world-wide.

ActiViz enables developers to combine the power of VTK with the many .NET framework objects for web and database access in order to quickly develop production-ready, interactive 3D applications in the .NET environment. Available as source code or as a pre-built WinForms Control, ActiViz .NET includes examples and

Kitware Announces Opening of European Office

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Lyon office allows the Company to continue its expansion
into European markets and better service its current
European customers and collaborators

CLIFTON PARK, NY – October 25, 2010 – Kitware, a software services company that builds open-source platforms and develops advanced research solutions, today announced the opening of its European Office Kitware SAS. Located in Lyon, France, the office will be headed by Julien Jomier, a current Kitware U.S. employee with expertise in software process, medical ima

VTK 5.6.1 Released

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of VTK 5.6.1, a patch release over 5.6.0 with a small set of improvements.

VTK now includes NetCDF 4.1.1 allowing users to take advantage of the latest enhancements to NetCDF. Additionally, the C++ version of the library is also included. A new file format, MPAS, has been added; it is a netcdf-based reader for ocean and atmosphere datasets.

Charts have significant improvements in axes layout and the ability to display multiple data series (up to four) in the same plot. Initial support for linked selection has been added to the charts in VTK and ParaView. Support for alpha blending in parallel coordinate plots has also been added.

We've cleaned up VTK's build and install rules so that developers don't have to worry about 'rpath' anymore.

Additionally, "make install" has been vastly improved on all platforms.

As always, we value your feedback. Please report any issues on the

ParaView 3.8.1 Released

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of ParaView 3.8.1, a patch release over 3.8.0 with a small set of improvements.

ParaView now comes HDF5 1.8.5. This enables developers to easily create readers and plugins for ParaView that use newer versions of HDF5. We are now including the C++ and the high level (hl) versions of the library for those who wish to use their newer API.

Among the improvements are two new file formats. The first is a netcdf based reader for MPAS format ocean and atmosphere datasets. The second, available in source form only, is a reader plugin that allows ParaView to read multi-resolution wavelet compressed VAPOR data format files. Thanks to John Clyne and Dan Legreca for contributing the VAPOR plugin.

We have improved the support for animation scripting through Python. The new API is more coherent with the rest of the ParaView Python API, avoiding the need for script writers to know minute details regarding how to create animations using proxies. Tracing cap

ParaView 3.8.1 RC 1 Binaries Now Available

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The ParaView team is pleased to announce the availability of the ParaView 3.8.1 Release Candidate 1 binaries for download on the ParaView download page. Final binaries should follow shortly.

Release Notes:

ParaView 3.8.1 is a patch release over 3.8.0 with a a small set of improvements. The following are some noteworthy improvements and fixes.

ParaView now comes HDF5 1.8.5. This enables developers to create readers/plugins for ParaView that use newer versions of HDF5 easily. Also we are now including the C++ and the high level (hl) versions of the libraryfor those who wish to use their newer API.

Among the improvements are two new file formats. The first is a netcdf based reader for MPAS format ocean and atmosphere data sets. The second, available in source form only is a reader plugin that allows ParaView to read multi-resolution wavelet compressed VAPOR data format files. Thanks to John Clyn

Kitware Ranks No. 1655 on the 2010 Inc. 5000 with Three-Year Sales Growth of 172%

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Inc. magazine today ranked Kitware NO. 1655 on its fourth annual Inc. 5000, an exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent-minded entrepreneurs. Music website Pandora, convenience store chain 7-Eleven, Brooklyn Brewery, and Radio Flyer, maker of the iconic children’s red wagon, are among the prominent brands featured on this year’s list.

“The leaders of the companies on this year’s Inc. 5000 have figured out how to grow their businesses during the longest recession since the Great Depression,” said Inc. president Bob LaPointe. “The 2010 Inc. 5000 showcases a particularly hardy group of entrepreneurs.”

Kitware, Inc. is a leader in the creation and support of open- source software

Kitware Welcomes Nine New Employees, Looking to Hire More

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes several new employees to the team:

Jacob Becker

Jacob joined Kitware's Computer Vision Group in October 2009 as an R&D Engineer. Jacob received his B.S. in Computer Science and Archaeology from the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse (UW-L) in 2001 and his M.S. in Computer Science from RPI in 2009. While at RPI he researched aligning a 2D image to a 3D model and filling in holes in LiDAR data using evidence provided by a single aligned 2D image.

Aasish Chaudhary

Aashish joined Kitware's Scientific Computing Group in October 2009 as an R&D Engineer. Aashish received his B.S. (Honors) in Mechanical Engineering from Devhi Ahilya University (India) in 2000 and his M.S. in Industrial Engineering with minor in Computer Science from Iowa State University. His thesis work involved researching, design

Kitware Awarded A $369,588 Contract from The Army Corps of Engineers To Extend Study in Hydrodynamic Simulation

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Proposed research to extend computational model building in the area of Coastal Modeling System Development (MORPHOS)

Kitware has received a contract for $369, 588 from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' research organization, the Engineer Research and Development Center, to focus on extending the functionality of the Computational Model Builder (CMB) environment specifically in the area of simulation models for coastal systems with an emphasis on Chesapeake and Delaware Bays.

The CMB environment consists of a suite of applications that provide the capability to define models suitable for hydrodynamic simulati

An Update on VTK's Git Conversion

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

We're pleased to announce the completion of the repository conversion. The CVS repositories have been permanently frozen (an extra commit will be added to them to help direct folks that try them at the new repos).

Development of VTK, ParaView, IceT, and Xdmf is now officially hosted by Git. All repositories may be browsed online via gitweb:

http://vtk.org/gitweb
http://paraview.org/gitweb

The individual gitweb pages show the repository URLs.
The git clone/fetch URLs for the repositories are:

git://vtk.org/VTK.git
git://vtk.org/VTKData.git
git://paraview.org/ParaView.git
git://paraview.org/ParaViewData.git
git://public.kitware.com/IceT.git
git://public.kitware.com/Xdmf.git

Replace "git://" with "http://" to get http protocol access.

The Wiki pages have been updated to refer to the offici

DARPA Awards Kitware with $99,000 to Pioneer Adaptive, Geospatial Visual Information System

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Research to increase safety and effectiveness of missions by improving battlefield information delivery

Kitware has received a $99,000 grant from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop an adaptive geospatial visual information system that will improve the dissemination of knowledge contained in data sources through the configuration of data preferences and density preference.

The core of Kitware's research will focus on overcoming suboptimal data access due to either network or device constraints and allowing for adaption to individual cognitive preferences. Individual users will be able to select and prioritize their desired data sources and adjust the parameters for visual information density of the display based upon preference, network, or the capabilities of their web-enabled device. Data feed preferences are then saved within a user profile to allow for automatic future adjustment.

VTK 5.6

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is planning to release VTK 5.6 this spring. Since the previous release, 270 new C++ classes have been added. The new features in VTK include improved support for line charts and bar charts that don't depend on Qt. With this release VTK provides a new text analysis module. Another major improvement is support for parallel rendering.

This release also includes changes that improve performance. VTK can now locate and insert non-uniformly distributed points three times faster than the previous version.

We've improved GPU support in VTK. The vtkGPUVolumeRayCastMapper has been migrated from VTKEdge to VTK. VTK 5.6 contains a GPU-based real time Line Integral Convolution (LIC) with enhanced image contrast and LIC + geometry compositing for dense vector field / flow visualization. These are just the highlights. For a complete list of changes, visit the VTK Wiki and search "VTK 5.6 Release Planning."

ParaView 3.8

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory are proud to announce the release of ParaView 3.8. The binaries and sources are available for download from the ParaView website. This release includes several performance improvements, bug fixes for users, and plenty of new features for plugin and application developers. We have made it easier to locate cells/points in your dataset using queries. Search the ParaView Wiki for "Find Data using Queries" for more information.

The plugin loading and management dialog was redesigned to make it easier to load plugins. It's now possible to configure plugins to be auto-loaded every time ParaView starts. We've added support for plotting over curves and intersection lines using the filters "Plot On Sorted Lines" and "Plot On Intersection Curves".

A couple of GPU-based rendering/visualization techniques have been incorporated along with GPU-based volume rendering support for 3D image volumes, which

Kitware Announces the VTK Journal

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Recently the VTK community has established an on-line VTK Journal. Like its sister, the Insight Journal, the VTK Journal supports open access publication, open data and open source to foster the growth of Open Science. We encourage you to visit and contribute articles and/or reviews to the VTK Journal.

Currently there are two articles in the Journal, with two more pending final publication. Once these two articles go live later today, the VTK users and developers lists will receive an automated email notifying the community of their availability. This is your cue to review and/or try out the submissions. This process will continue for future article submissions.

Kitware's open access journals are built on the MIDAS multimedia and data publication system. MIDAS, which is now an open source technology, is a general framework on which Kitware builds cu

ParaView 3.6.2 Now Available

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Lab are proud to announce the release of ParaView 3.6.2. The binaries and sources are available for download from the ParaView website. ParaView 3.6.2 contains the following new features and improvements:

The Python interface has been revamped, an exciting new extension to the Paraview Python interface is Python trace. The goal of trace is to generate human readable, not overly verbose, Python scripts that mimic a user's actions in the GUI. See the "Python Trace" article on page 6 of the October 2009 Kitware Source for more details.

ParaView 3.6.2 includes a collection of statistics algorithms. You can compute descriptive statistics (mean, variance, min, max, skewness, kurtosis), compute contingency tables, perform k-means analysis, examine correlations between arrays, and perform principal component analysis on arrays. More in

Kitware Wins Phase I DOE SBIR for Visual Workflow

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has been awarded a Phase I SBIR by the Department of Energy to develop an integrated visual workflow environment which supports increasingly data intensive scientific processes. The work will focus on the data management, comparison and evaluation of extremely large datasets. The open source visualization systems ParaView and VisIt, as well as other emerging data management tools such as MIDAS and the Globus Metadata Catalog Service will be used. Kitware plans to develop a flexible architecture so that other computational tools may be used in place of these in the future.

Kitware Wins Phase II DOE SBIR for Collaborative Visualization

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) were awarded a Phase II SBIR by the Department of Energy to develop collaborative visualization tools for large-scale data. The proposed work will address the typical problems faced by geographically and organizationally separated research and engineering teams, who produce large data and wish to work together to analyze and understand that data.

Kitware Wins Phase I DOE SBIR for AMR Streaming

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

In this Phase I Department of Energy award, Kitware plans to extend its open source parallel visualization application, ParaView, to process Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) datasets by “streaming” them. Only the data that is being viewed will be loaded, processed and displayed. This will require a much smaller cluster than is currently needed to load and view entire AMR volumes.

ParaViewPro: Professional Support for ParaView

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is now offering a professional support package for ParaView, its open-source scientific visualization system. ParaViewPro allows subscribers to customize their support package based on their number of end users and computational clusters. The yearly subscriptions cover build and installation issues on the supported computational clusters, prioritized bug fixes, and usage questions for all supported end users.

The ParaViewPro support subscriptions are available for End-Users at $950 per year and as a cluster (Server) subscription for $1850 per year. The End-User Subscription covers all basic usage questions for ParaView, plus prioritized bug fixes and feature requests. The Server Subscription provides build and installation assistance for running the ParaView server on a single cluster.

Discounts are available for organizations wishing to obtain support on several servers for a group of end users. Please contact sales@kitware.com for a custom qu

Kitware Wins DOE Phase I SBIR

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has been awarded a Phase I SBIR from the Department of Energy entitled "Multi-Resolution Streaming for Remote Scalable Visualization." This project expands upon Kitware's expertise in Distance Visualization, which is becoming a critical area of research now that scientists and the massive amounts of data processed on supercomputers are often in two or more geographically separate locations. The goal of this Phase I award is to demonstrate a system that allows computational results to remain on the supercomputing system, while using a client-server architecture to process, analyze, and visualize the data. In order to achieve this goal, we will employ multi-resolution visualization methods that only load and display blocks of data, at the appropriate resolution, that are necessary for a particular visualization task.

MIDAS 2.2 Released

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

MIDAS, Kitware's digital archiving and distributed processing system, has seen its second major release in a year. MIDAS collects, manages and process digital media. Among the new features added are:

• Better policies management
• Improved navigation
• Faster database access and rendering
• New DICOM metadata extraction and search
• Improved security for private collections
• Faster search
• LDAP support
• Improved image gallery
• Initial support for custom workflow
• New web services API
• Redesigned grid computing management

Kitware's public instance of MIDAS is available at http://insight-journal.org/midas, and is host to hundreds of freely available scientific and medical datasets.

For more information about MIDAS and to downl

ParaView 3.6 Released

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Lab are proud to announce the release of ParaView 3.6. The binaries and sources are available for download from the ParaView website. This release includes several new features along with plenty of bug fixes addressing a multitude of usability and stability issues including those affecting parallel volume rendering.

Based on user feedback, ParaView's Python API has undergone a major overhaul. The new simplified scripting interface makes it easier to write procedural scripts mimicking the steps users would follow when using the GUI to perform tasks such as creating sources, applying filters, etc. Details on the new scripting API can be found on the Paraview Wiki. We have been experimenting with adding support for additional file formats such as CGNS, Silo, Tecplot using VisIt plugins. Since this is an experimental feature, only the Linux and Windows binaries distributed from our website support these new file formats.

ParaView now

Coming Soon: ParaView 3.6

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware and Sandia National Laboratories are getting ready for the next major release of ParaView, version 3.6. The binaries and sources will be available for download upon release from the ParaView website. This release includes several new features along with plenty of bug fixes addressing a multitude of usability and stability issues, including those affecting parallel volume rendering.

Based on user feedback, ParaView's Python API has undergone a major overhaul. The new simplified scripting interface makes it easier to write procedural scripts mimicking the steps users would follow when using the GUI to perform tasks such as creating sources, applying filters, etc. We are also working on saving trace as Python scripts, making it easier for beginners to get familiar with the ParaView Python API. Details on the new scripting API can be found on the ParaView Wiki.

We have been experimenting with adding support for additional file formats such as CGNS, Silo, and Tecplot using a third party

OverView

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware will be releasing an alpha version of a new toolkit called OverView alongside of the ParaView 3.6 release later this month. The OverView application was designed to support informatics analysis and visualization methods which can be applied to data from sources such as relational databases, spreadsheets and XML. The application supports features such as automatic graph layout, hierarchical organization of data, graph analysis algorithms and charting.

OverView also integrates 2D and 3D geospatial views for plotting relational data on the globe. Kitware, in conjunction with Sandia National Labs, will continue to explore and develop informatics tools which combine information visualization, statistical analysis, and linked views to facilitate interactive data exploration. Please visit sandia.gov/OverView for more information on this application and kitware.com for more information on Kitw

NIH Grant Supports Research Into Mapping the Brain With Machine Vision

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

For as much as we know about the human body, the inner workings of the brain remain elusive. This lack of understanding has precluded the development of a neuroprosthetic device, or brain implant, that is truly biocompatible with brain tissue. A multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Professor Badri Roysam has secured a $2.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a new, open source software toolkit for analyzing 3-D multichannel brain images — a critical step toward the development of a viable brain implant.

Such a permanent or long-term brain implant could benefit any number of individuals who have suffered brain trauma, but so far, researchers have been unsuccessful in developing neuroprosthetics that are not ultimately rejected and rendered useless by the surrounding brain tissue.

The multiyear project aims to arm biologists and other brain experts with the ability to better map, understand, and quantify the complex interactions between the comp

Kitware Sponsors VisWeek 2008

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is a Gold Sponsor for IEEE VisWeek 2008 which will be held October 19-24, 2008, in Columbus, Ohio. VisWeek 2008 is the premier forum for data and information visualization advances for academia, government, and industry. This event brings together researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in tools, techniques, and technology. The conferences and symposium include exciting and informative collections of workshops, tutorials, papers, panels, demonstrations, posters, and exhibitions.

ParaView 3.4 Released

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

ParaView 3.4 release is now available for download from the ParaView website. It is also available through CVS; the tag is ParaView-3-4. Since the 3.2 release, we have been focusing on usability; 3.4 contains many improvements and bug fixes.

The major changes since 3.4 are:

VTK and ParaView are now licensed under the BSD license as opposed to modified BSD.
The multi-block and AMR support was improved significantly. Almost all filters, spreadsheet view and charts now support these datasets.
The selection capabilities of ParaView were significantly improved. For details, see the July 2008 Kitware Source.

New features

Support for plotting multiple point/cell values over time.
Support for picking end-points of line widgets using ‘p’.

ParaView 3 Update

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The LANL ParaView 3 contract is designed to provide support for ParaView and VTK and custom development to assist Jim Ahren's visualization group at Los Alamos National Lab. Jim's group, in turn, provides visualization support to LANL scientists.

The support part of the contract has included teaching a VTK and a ParaView course at LANL, answering technical questions about VTK and ParaView (for example, assisting a LANL developer with writing a parallel time varying reader plug-in), and cleaning and committing LANL improvements to VTK and ParaView (for example, upcoming Manta Real Time Ray Tracer RenderWindow and Renderer classes).

Kitware Wins Air Force Phase I STTR for Feature Extraction with ParaView

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has partnered with David Thompson at Mississippi State University and Raghu Machiraju at Ohio State University on a Phase I Air Force STTR. Since this is an STTR, David Thompson will be the academic partner leading this work. In the proposed work, ParaView will serve as the application framework upon which we will build feature extraction techniques for computational fluid dynamics. In particular, we will focus on complex, turbulent flow problems. These datasets are necessarily temporal in extent and exceptionally large in size. MSU and OSU have developed complex algorithms for feature extraction that we will incorporate into VTK and ParaView, with the goal of commercializing add-on modules.

Multi-block Support in ParaView

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

One of the major targets for ParaView 3.4 is to support composite datasets natively. As a starting point, Kitware has restructured the composite dataset hierarchy to make it more use-case driven and easy to understand than before. Composite datasets now support a full tree data structure, instead of the table-of-tables approach used earlier. Composite data iterators are now more powerful in that they can be used to not only access datasets in a composite dataset, but also initialize/set them. This makes is possible for filters to work with iterators directly without having to downcast to a concrete subclass as was the case earlier.

The ParaView GUI is also undergoing major overhaul to support the users' need to explore the composite data tree. Filters dealing with composite data sets such as ExtractBlock, ExtractLevel, ExtractDataSet now show the entire composite dataset tree on the client making it possible for users to choose the nodes that they are interested in directly using the GUI. Similarly

CFD Co-Processing Project

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Co-processing is the term used for the processing of visualization information during the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation run. With most of the top parallel computers having on the order of 10,000 processors (the highest ranked computer on the http://www.top500.org currently has 212,992 processors) it is unrealistic to expect to be able to efficiently analyze raw results from such machines on typical visualization machines.

Last year Kitware was awarded a Phase I SBIR, "Fluid Dynamics Co-Processing for Unsteady Visualization", to solve the analysis issues created by the limited storage capacity and slow computational ability of typical visualization machines. The main goal of the project is to develop a "co-processing" ability using VTK for parallel CFD codes.

Currently, Kitware is able to extract CFD data directly from two different CFD codes (a Chimera/overset mesh and a mixed topology unstructured mesh) and co-process suc

StreamingParaView Application Enables Interactive Vis on Large Data

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is working with Los Alamos National Labs on a project that will extend ParaView to enable interactive visualization, even when the data size exceeds the available memory resources. Massive datasets can make visualization difficult or impossible, even with access to large parallel processing compute resources. One solution is streaming: to divide a dataset into smaller pieces, and run each of these pieces through a given visualization pipeline in turn to generate a complete result while maintaining a small memory foot print. In the paper "A modular extensible visualization system architecture for culled prioritized data streaming" published in The Proceedings of SPIE Volume 6495, Ahrens et. al describe extensions to VTK that improve upon its support for streaming. The new techniques include discarding pieces of the input dataset that do not contribute to the final visualization and prioritizing those that do. With prioritization, the most important p

ParaView 3.2 Released

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

In November 2007, Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories, CSimSoft and Los Alamos Laboratory announced the release of ParaView 3.2.1 (stable). The ParaView 3.2 release is available for download from the ParaView website: http://www.paraview.org/HTML/Download.html and through CVS, the tag is ParaView-3-2.

This release includes the following enhancements/fixes:

New animation view for viewing, creating and modifying animations, making ParaView more intuitive and easier to use.
The "Element Inspector" has been replaced by a brand new "Spreadsheet View" which makes it possible to view raw data produced by any source/filter.
Filters with multiple outputs and inputs are now supported; this has opened doors for s

ParaView 2.6 Released

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The ParaView 2.6 release (version 2.6.1) is now available for download from the ParaView website (www.paraview.org/HTML/Download.html). It is also available through CVS; the tag is ParaView-2-6. There have been several changes since the 2.4 release of ParaView; they include the following:

Parallel uniform rectilinear grid volume rendering (vtkImageData)
New algorithms for parallel unstructured grid volume rendering
Hardware accelerated offscreen rendering using OpenGL framebuffers (supported on all platforms)
Improved multi-block support
Improved AMR support
Animation saving with ffmpeg
The mesh quality filter now uses the verdict library (more quality measures)
New readers: FLUENT, OpenFOAM, MFIX, LSDyna, AcuSolve
Gradient filter for unstructured data
Picking/Probing/Data Analysis filter improvements:
• Fix lockup when some nodes lack

ParaView III Alpha Release

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400

In March 2007 a new snapshot (2.9.9) of the alpha release of ParaView III was created. This snapshot includes binaries for Windows, Linux (32 and 64 bit) and Mac OS X. To download the snapshot, visit paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_III_snapshots. The following new features have been added over the past few months.

Support for Plugins: ParaView 3 provides much more powerful plugin support than that provided by ParaView 2. Examples are provided along with the source (in ParaView3/Examples/Plugins). Detailed documentation is available at http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Plugin_HowTo.
Extended Animation Support: ParaView 3 now makes it possible to animate the Camera, Cut/Clip planes, etc. There is no animation track editor at this point.
Selection: We are working on improving the selection mechanism. Currently users can select cells/points by ids, locations, or t

Air Force Research Labs awards Kitware Phase II SBIR

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The Air Force Research Labs has awarded Kitware Inc. a Phase II SBIR to automate the segmentation of 3D image datasets, for the purpose of converting this segmented datasets into simulation models. In addition, Kitware will develop semi-automatic methods including editing tools (i.e., 3D widgets) for manually guiding or modifying the results of segmentation tasks.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Ala

DOD Awards Kitware Phase II STTR for High-Performance GPU Computing

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0400

The DOD Army Research Lab has Awarded Kitware a Phase II STTR for accelerated data processing and rendering using GPU technologies. The focus of the work is to utilize the graphical processing unit to support of the ParaView visualization system. Recent advances in graphics hardware (and associated software libraries) enables the GPU to be programmed for a variety of tasks. This offers a significant opportunity for improving performance since GPUs have been previously relegated to rendering data; now they can be used for modeling and processing data. The PI for this award is Dr. Amitabh Varshney at the University of Maryland College Park.

ParaView 2.4 Released

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

ParaView 2.4 was released in November 2005. The latest patch to this release (2.4.4) was in June 2006. New features in ParaView 2.4 include:

• Improved support for multi-block and AMR data sets.
• Movies and screen captures are now rendered off-screen, allowing you to cover or close the application without
destroying the captured image.
• Improved handling of empty data.
• Support has been added for ParaView internals scripts.
• The Spy Plot CTH reader has been improved.
• Added support for selecting functions from Plot3D files.
• Preliminary Python wrapping support has been added.

Kitware Signs Contract to Develop Parallel Processing Tools

Fri, 10 Mar 2000 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware was signed a three-year contract with the three National Labs - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore - to develop parallel processing tools for VTK.

The goal of the project is to develop scalable parallel processing tools with an emphasis on distributed memory implementations. The project includes parallel algorithms, infrastructure, I/O, support, and display devices. In addition, some GUI components and end-user applications will be developed. The bulk of the technology developed in this contract will be embedded into the standard VTK open-source distribution.