Features
- VisIt provides support for a wide range of computational meshes, including two- and three-dimensional rectilinear, curvilinear, and unstructured meshes.
- VisIt's visualization capabilities are grouped primarily into two categories:
- Plots are used to visualize data and include boundary, contour, curve, mesh, pseudocolor, streamline, surface, vector, and volume.
- Operators consist of operations that may be performed on the data prior to visualization. Some examples include slice, index select, iso-surface, onion peel, reflect, threshold, and part selection.
- 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: Responsible for rendering and typically is run on a local desktop or visualization server.
- Engine: Responsible for the bulk of the data processing and input/output (I/O) and typically is run on a remote machine where the data is located. This eliminates the need to move the data and makes high-end compute and I/O resources available to the engine. The engine can be run serially or in parallel (MPI).
- Interfaces to C++, Python, and Java. Extensible by dynamically loaded plug-ins.
- VisIt also has the ability to animate data, allowing users to see the time evolution of their data.
For more information, see the VisIt documentation page. |  |
VisIt at RZG
Availability
VisIt is available on the visualization cluster, as well as on most Linux machines at RZG (issue module avail to get an up-to-date software list).
A database plugin for reading GADGET output (use file extension .gadget or explicitly specify GADGET format in the VisIt "open" dialog) is available.
How to use VisIt
RZG visualization staff strongly recommends to use VisIt on the RZG visualization cluster for interactive remote visualization. For non-interactive use (e.g. script controlled rendering), it is also possible to use other Linux clusters (e.g. where the user's simulation code is running on).
Documentation
- VisIt documentation page
- Local copies of the documentation can be found at
/afs/rzg/common/soft/visualization/visit/doc/.
Input data
- VisIt supports multiple mesh types and can read a large variety of common data formats. The recommended data format is Silo.
- The "Getting Data Into VisIt" document at visit.llnl.gov/manuals.html provides a thorough introduction and provides guidelines for different I/O handling and conversion strategies.
Support
Send email to RZG visualization staff (visualization@rzg.mpg.de) in case of questions which are not covered by this documentation.
