Paraview News

Kitware Launches Developer Blog

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware launched its first developer blog today which will be penned by Kitware's Research and Development Team and Corporate Leadership. The blog was designed to help our user community and those with an interest in specific Kitware toolkits, products or people, keep up with our current thoughts and interests.

Our team is free to write about whatever topic they'd like (of course, without violating any legal agreements). So what you see on the blog may not necessarily represent the views of Kitware as a whole, and you may even see dissenting opinions in the comments posted by other Kitware employees. Comments have been enabled so that you can interact with the posts as they go live. We encourage our readers to provide suggestions and engage in a dialogue with us and each other through the Kitware blog. While we do allow negative feedback, we will remove any spam, profanity, or excessively

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.

ParaView 3.6.2 Now Available

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

Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory are happy to announce the release of ParaView 3.6.2. This is a minor patch release which includes a few critical bug fixes and two exciting new features.

ParaView's Python interface was revamped, an exciting new extension to the interface is Python trace. The goal is to generate human readable, not overly verbose, Python scripts that mimic a user's actions in the GUI. The "Python Trace" article on page 6 of this quarter's Kitware Source, discusses this functionality in greater detail.

ParaView 3.6.2 also includes a collection of statistical algorithms to 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.

For more information about these filte

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.

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.

ITK 3.16 is Now Available

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

ITK is an open-source, cross-platform system that provides developers with an extensive suite of software tools for image analysis. ITK is distributed under an OSI-Approved BSD License and and has been developed using the same software engineering tools as ParaView (e.g., cmake, dashboards, doxygen). ITK provides leading-edge algorithms for registering and segmenting multidimensional data. Methods exist in the InsightApplications repository for connecting ITK and VTK pipelines together, allowing ITK methods to be easily integrated into ParaView modules.

The ITK development team released the latest version, 3.16, on September 15, 2009. ITK 3.16 is now available for download. More details about this release can be found in the 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

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).

For the past two years Kitware has had funding from the Army Research Labs to explore the use of GPU (Graphics Processing Units) for visualization. This was an STTR in collaboration with University of Maryland, College Park. One of the outcomes of this funding was the birth of VTKEdge. Fueled by contributions from several other projects and funding sources, VTKEdge is now blooming into a collection of tools for improved visualization. All of the components that we talk about here have made it into VTKEdge.

We’ve developed a framework for incorporating GLSL or CUDA-based algorithms into VTK. A collection of classes that abstracts the OpenGL data structures for transferring data to and from GPU memory are provided. Using this infrastructure, writing new algorithms that exploit the parallelism provide

New Open Source Project Sites

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

In late October Kitware will launch the new ParaView (paraview.org) and CDash (cdash.org) websites. The new CMake (cmake.org) site went live at the beginning of September. Additionally, a brand new site for the new VTKEdge toolkit (vtkedge.org) will go live in late October as well. The new site design is focused on providing researchers and developers with streamlined access to information and will provide users with a multitude of resources to assist in development, creating easier access to licensing information, related publications, ways to get involved with the projects, and resources for development and support. Additionally, the new sites are uniformly designed so that users will find consistency when accessing information from project to project.

Kitware awarded SBIR Phase II for 'Co-Processing for Unsteady CFD Simulations'

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware was recently awarded a Phase II SBIR from the Department of Defense. The purpose of this project is to develop tools for co-processing unsteady CFD codes for the purpose of visualization and analysis.

As the compute capability of our computational resources grows, we are facing a discrepancy between our ability to produce results and store them for analysis. We are quickly outstripping the capability of IO resources to store results from time-dependent simulations and the capability of post-processing tools running on small- to medium-sized clusters to analyze such data. The main objective of this SBIR is to integrate core data processing with the simulation to enable scalable data analysis.

The Phase I effort focused on developing a prototype of a distributed co-processing system capable of processing, at run-time, results of large and distributed simulations. During Phase I, we developed a co-processing library prototype and successfully tested it with two CFD codes: Overflow from

Large Scale Visualization with ParaView Tutorial at Supercomputing 2008

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Berk Geveci, Utkarsh Ayachit and Dave DeMarle from Kitware and Ken Moreland and John Greenfield from Sandia National Labs will be presenting a tutorial on “Large Scale Visualization with Paraview” on Monday November 17 during the Supercomputing 2008 conference. This tutorial presents the architecture of ParaView and the fundamentals of parallel visualization. Attendees will learn the basics of using ParaView for scientific visualization with hands-on lessons. The tutorial will provide an introduction to scripting and extending ParaView and provide attendees with detailed guidance for visualizing the massive simulations run on today’s supercomputers. Attendees should bring laptops to the tutorial so that they may install ParaView and follow along with the demonstrations.

ParaView is a powerful open-source turnkey application for analyzing and visualizing large data sets in parallel. Regularly used by Sandia National Laboratories analysts to visualize simulat

Advanced ParaView Visualization Tutorial at VisWeek 2008

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

ParaView is a powerful open-source turnkey application for analyzing and visualizing scientific datasets ranging from small desktop-sized problems to the world’s largest simulations. ParaView is used by numerous government, educational, and commercial institutions throughout the world. Designed to be configurable, extendible, and scalable, ParaView is built upon the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) to allow for the rapid deployment of visualization components. Through this tutorial, organizer Kenneth Moreland of the Sandia National Labs brought together David Thompson (Sandia), Timothy Shead (Sandia), John Biddiscombe (CSCS) and Utkarsh Ayachit (Kitware) whom are all designers and builders of ParaView as means of giving researchers and developers detailed guidance on the behavior and abilities of the ParaView application.

This knowledge allowed the tutorial participants to solve their unique visualization problems, modify the ParaView application to their specific problem domains, or l

Kitware Wins DoE Phase I SBIR to Develop Collaborative Visualization with ParaView

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

Kitware has won a $100K Phase I SBIR with the Department of Energy. The proposed work aims to develop a parallel visualization system that will enable effective multiple remote collaborations for complex analysis in a large-scale data environment. We are partnering with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). We expect to commercialize this work by using the open source ParaView project as a technology deployment platform. We will be commercializing add-on modules that extend ParaView to address domain-specific needs.

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.

Facilitating Interactive Visualization in ParaView