Talk on Open Source Visualization of Scientific Data

Marcus Hanwell will present a talk on the open source visualization of scientific data on August 8 from 2:40-3:15 in Room 3. The abstract for the talk follows.

As computational power increases, scientists are able to run larger and more accurate simulations. This is creating siginificant challenges in scientific research as the amount of data produced increases, previous analysis techniques become less useful. Worse still, if common formats cannot be agreed upon getting the output of one code into a suitable analysis tool can be difficult. This is where open source tools present a strong alternative to traditional software models.

This talk introduces some of the open source technology developed by Kitware, and the open source communities that collaborate on these tools and frameworks. Recent advances in open source scientific visualization will be discussed, going from smaller chemical data sets such as those that can be analyzed by Avogadro, through to very large data sets visualized by the Visualization Toolkit and ParaView. The talk will examine current challenges in visualizing scientific data, new efforts to produce common infrastructure to help scientists and how open collaboration platforms are a key component in cutting edge research.

The adoption of the Avogadro library by Kalzium will be discussed, and how we might encourage further collaboration between academics and the KDE community. The modularzation of VTK will be discussed, and how developers can use VTK in KDE applications to use advanced visualization techniques such as volume rendering, isosurfaces, contours, 3D interaction widgets, informatics and 2D charts along with an overview of the pipeline mechanism used to build up complex visualizations.

Introduction to CMake Workshop

On Thursday, August 11, Marcus Hanwell and Bill Hoffman will be presenting the workshop ‘Introduction to CMake’ at 3:00. This 2 hour workshop will be a hands-on session on CMake usage for those new to CMake. No prior knowledge of CMake will be assumed; Bill and Marcus will go through all the steps necessary to create a new project, find and link to libraries. Participants will leave with knowledge of how to create a new project, with some background on generators to use various IDEs in addition to standard Makefiles.

In addition, a former Kitware intern, Alex Neundorf, and Raphael Kubo da Costa will host a ‘Beyond the Basics CMake’ workshop on the 11th from 5:00-7:00. 

Physical Event