ABSTRACT
Tech-X Corporation, Swiss National Supercomputing Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center
16.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 16.2 Focal Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
16.2.1 Enable Data Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359 16.2.2 Support for Large Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360 16.2.3 Provide a Robust and Usable Product for End Users . . 360
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16.3.1 Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 16.3.2 Parallelism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362 16.3.3 User Interface Concepts and Extensibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363 16.3.4 The Size and Breadth of VisIt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
16.4 Successes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364 16.4.1 Scalability Successes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364 16.4.2 A Repository for Large Data Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365 16.4.3 Supercomputing Research Performed with VisIt . . . . . . . . 366 16.4.4 User Successes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
16.5 Future Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368 16.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
VisIt is a popular open source tool for visualizing and analyzing data. It owes its success to its foci of increasing data understanding, large data support, and providing a robust and usable product, as well as its underlying design that fits today’s supercomputing landscape. This chapter, which draws heavily from a publication at the SciDAC Conference in 2011 by Childs et al. [2], describes the VisIt project and its accomplishments.
