Vis IT - Features

Features

• Has rich feature set for scalar, vector, and tensor field visualization. VisIt handles 2D and 3D data equally well. VisIt also has the ability to animate data, allowing users to see the time evolution of their data.

• Provides qualitative and quantitative visualization and analysis. VisIt provides support for derived fields, which allow new fields to be calculated using existing fields. For example, if a dataset contains a velocity field, it is possible to define a new field that is the velocity magnitude. It also supports a generalized query interface, which allows you to query derived quantities such as volume or surface area.

• Supports multiple mesh types. VisIt provides support for a wide range of computational meshes, including two- and three-dimensional point, rectilinear, curvilinear, and unstructured meshes. In addition, VisIt supports structured AMR meshes and CSG meshes.

• Powerful, full-featured graphical user interface. VisIt’s graphical user interface allows novice users to quickly get started visualizing their data, as well as allowing power users access to advanced features. It automatically creates time-based animations from data sets that contain multiple time steps. In addition, it also has a keyframe animation capability that allows users to create sophisticated animations. VisIt allows users to pan, zoom, and rotate objects interactively using the mouse. It also gives users the ability to interactively size and position geometric objects such as planes and spheres.

• Parallel and distributed architecture. VisIt employs a distributed and parallel architecture in order to handle extremely large data sets interactively. VisIt’s rendering and data processing capabilities are split into viewer and engine components that may be distributed across multiple machines:
  • Viewer is responsible for rendering and is typically run on a local desktop or visualization server so that it can leverage the extremely powerful graphics cards.
  • Engine is responsible for the bulk of the data processing and input/output and is typically run on a remote machine where the data is located. This eliminates the need move the data and makes high-end compute and I/O resources available to it. The engine can be run serially on a single processor or in parallel on thousands of processors.

• Interfaces with C++, Python, and Java. The C++ and Java interfaces make it possible to provide alternate user interfaces for VisIt or allow existing C++ or Java applications to add visualization support. The Python scripting interface gives users the ability to batch process data using a scripting language. This feature can be used to create extremely sophisticated animations or implement regression suites.

• Extensible with dynamically loaded plug-ins. VisIt achieves extensibility through the use of dynamically loaded plugins. All of VisIt’s plots, operators, and database readers are implemented as plugins and are loaded at run-time from the plugin directory. New plugins can be added simply by installing them in this directory. VisIt comes with a graphical plugin creation tool, which greatly simplifies the process of creating new plugins.

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.