Paraview News

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

Kitware Courses Move to Webinar Format

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware announced free monthly online introductory courses in September 2011, and within days all four scheduled courses for VTK, CMake, ParaView, and ITK were filled. To better handle the community demand, Kitware has switched to a webinar format allowing up to 100 attendees per session. The following sessions now have additional availability:

Introduction to CMake
November 9, 2011, 10:00-11:30 a.m. EST
This webinar has already happened - view the recorded session.

This course provides an introduction to the CMake cross-platform build tool used by many open-source and commercial development projects world-wide. Using a tutorial format, this course introduces the concept of the basic CMakeLists configuration file for a simple project, then expands upon this to cover set

Kitware Books on Amazon in France and Germany

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce that Amazon is now carrying a selection of Kitware titles in both France and Germany. These titles are also still available through Amazon in the USA and in the UK, and directly through the Kitware web site. This allows international customers the ability to significantly reduce their shipping costs by selecting the Amazon site closest to them. Bulk orders of 10 or more books should still be ordered directly from Kitware to receive the best discount.

Currently, three titles are available through amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, and amazon.de including the VTK User's Guide, the VTK Textbook, and Mastering CMake. The ParaView Guide is cur

Free Online Courses Now Available

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

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.

Introduction to VTK
This course provides an overview of the Visualization Toolkit suitable for new users. It covers the various data types supported by VTK, the pipeline architecture used for processing data, and the rendering framework used to display results. Attendees gain hands on experience through several programming examples presented to highlight key concepts. Examples cover the execution pipeli

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 Ranks #1572 on the 2011 Inc. 5000 List

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Inc. magazine announced this week its fifth annual Inc. 500|5000 list, an exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. Kitware ranked #1572 overall, with three-year revenue growth of 175%, and #118 within its industry. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent entrepreneurs. Online retailer ideeli tops this year’s list. Kitware joins Spirit Airlines, television maker Vizio, Honest Tea, Dunkin Donuts and Metrokane, makers of the Rabbit corkscrew, among other prominent brands featured on this year’s list.

This is the fourth consecutive year that Kitware has made the Inc.500|5000 list, predominantly attributed to its talented workforce and the success of its open-source business model. Kitware provides a

Cmake 2.8.5 Released

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of CMake 2.8.5. Particularly notable about this release is the number of individuals around the world who contributed code; 33 individuals added changes that have been incorporated into the CMake 2.8.5 release. By using a git workflow we are able to preserve the author in commit objects, even if pushed or applied by another contributor, enabling us to measure the number of contributors.

Additionally, there are new features in the release, such as the ProcessorCount module that provides a CMake language-based way to retrieve the number of processors usable for parallel building or testing. The CheckPrototypeDefinition module allows users to check if an exact function signature definition is available.

For the full list of changes and updates, the change log is available here and the release

Kitware Projects and People Recognized for Work with Qt

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Over the past five years Kitware has been transitioning to Qt for the development of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). Qt provides a powerful, open-source, cross-platform GUI toolkit that is developed through a strong community effort, and is widely adopted by software developers. By using Qt, developers are able to easily create GUIs that are familiar and intiutive to users, a key component when working with complex software.

Kitware transitioned ParaView to Qt in 2007 with the release of ParaView 3. In 2008, the Qt-based GUI front end to CMake was released. Kitware is also playing a key role in the transition of 3D Slicer to Qt with the forthcoming release of Slicer 4.

In recognition of the work in Qt, Kitware is pleased to announce that Marcus Hanwell and Rob Maynard have been named Qt ambassadors. This worldwi

NASA Awards Kitware Contract to Develop ParaView for Ultrascale Visualization

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

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

Kitware Announces Open Source Course in Lyon, France

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is pleased to announce a course covering its open source tools scheduled for February 2-4, 2011 in Lyon, France. This course will cover the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), CMake, and ParaView, and is suitable for software developers who would like to learn more about these tools and for project managers intending to integrate these software tools into their team's development process. The course will be a hands-on experience, with attendees downloading the software tools in advance to use during the course exercises. By working in a familiar development environment (Windows, Linux, or Mac), attendees will be able to better focus on the course content, and will retain the course exercises for future reference.

The early registration deadline

Kitware's Most Popular Books Available on amazon.co.uk

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Two of Kitware's most popular technical books, Mastering CMake (ISBN-13: 978-1-930934-22-1) and The VTK User's Guide (ISBN-13: 978-1-930934-23-8) are now available through amazon.co.uk.

"This is great news for our European customers who can now obtain our books with the less expensive and more flexible shipping options that can be offered only by a large retail service such as Amazon," said Lisa Avila, Vice President

Kitware Offers Free Access to VolView

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has announced that VolView, a commercial product for exploring and analyzing complex 3D medical or scientific data, will now be available free of charge to researchers around the world.

First developed in 1999 as an intuitive, interactive system for volume visualization, VolView allows users to load and interactively explore datasets using both 2D and 3D display methods. To view a short demonstration, please click here.

Compatible with Windows, Mac or Linux, VolView is capable of volume rendering, maximum intensity projections and oblique reformatting. In addition, VolView can load multiple datasets simultaneously, support creating and applying 2D a

Kitware Receives Honors in 2010 HPCwire Readers� and Editors� Choice Awards

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Annual HPCwire Awards Demonstrate Achievement of Mindshare from Within the Global HPC Community

Kitware, Inc. has been recognized in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, presented at the 2010 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC10) in New Orleans. The list of winners was revealed at the HPCwire booth at the event, and on the HPCwire website. Kitware was recognized with the following honors:

− Editors' Choice Award for Best HPC Visualization Product or Technology (for ParaView);
− Readers' Choice Award for Best HPC Visualization Product of Technology (for ParaView).

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

Kitware Welcomes Nine New Employees

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Lynn Bardsley
Lynn joined Kitware as a Program Manager for the Computer Vision Group in July. She received her M.S. in Computer Science from Union College.

Dhanannjay Deo
Dr. Deo joined Kitware as a member of the Scientific Visualization Group in August. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pune, his M.S. from the Indian Institute of Science and his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Xiaoxiao Liu
Xiaoxiao joined Kitware as a member of the Medical Imaging Group in September. She received a B.E. in Computer Science and an M.E. in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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

VTK and ParaView to Make Transition to Git

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

Over the next few days we will transition both VTK and ParaView to Git. Additional details are available on these Wiki pages (under development):

http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Git
http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Git

We've already released the binaries for ParaView and the binaries for VTK will be available soon. Our timeline for the permanent transition is:

April 16: Have Kitware-maintained VTK and ParaView dashboard clients transitioned to use new "vtk_common" and "paraview_common" helper scripts that provide a single point of change for switching from CVS to Git.

April 19: Lock VTK and ParaView CVS repositories, push final changes to Git, switch all dashboards over to Git. There will be a final commit to CVS after this that adds a message() to

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

Improved 2 and 3D Images

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

ParaView finally supports a mode in which 2D image data is no longer rendered as points, instead we upload the image as a texture and apply it to a quad. This has been extended to 3D images as well, where the user can choose a slice of the 3D image data to view.

Currently, we are sorting out issues with parallel rendering.

Custom Filters

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

Since the beginning, ParaView 3 has toyed with the idea of user-defined filter packages that could be built on the fly, include pipelines to other filters and be used simply just like ordinary filters. This is what we call Custom Filters. Custom filters were redesigned from the ground up so now they work seamlessly with regular filters. It's now possible to have multiple pipelines within these filters and as well expose the ends of multiple pipelines as the output.

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.

Sandia National Labs Achieves Breakthrough Performance Using NVIDIA(R) Technology For Scientific Visualization

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. and SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sandia National Labs, Kitware Inc., and NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA - News) today announced a breakthrough in large data scientific visualization, attaining rendering rates of over 1.5 billion polygons per second.

The breakthrough was achieved with ParaView (www.paraview.org), an open source visualization application developed by Kitware Inc. (www.kitware.com), processing data in the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program at the three national laboratories: Sandia National Labs (SNL); Los Alamos National Labs (LANL); Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL).

Visualization is an integral component of ASC and is essential to understanding the massive data produced in simulations for national security. One of the world's largest polygonal datasets is a 473 million triangle is

Kitware announced ParaView 0.6

Thu, 10 Oct 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware announced today the release of ParaView 0.6, the first public release of their scientific visualization application. ParaView was designed with the need to visualize large data sets in mind. The goals of the ParaView project include the following:

Develop an open-source, multi-platform visualization application.
Support distributed computation models to process large data sets.
Create an open, flexible, and intuitive user interface.
Develop an extensible architecture based on open standards.

ParaView runs on distributed and shared memory parallel as well as single processor systems and has been succesfully tested on Windows, Linux and various Unix workstations and clusters. Under the hood, ParaView uses the Visualization Toolkit as the data processing and rendering engine and has a user interface written using a unique blend of Tcl/Tk and C++. Please see the ParaView web page for detailed informa

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.