Visit Visualization - Quite Powerful
Visit is a large scale scientific visualization software from LLNL . I have tried out Visit on our cluster NYX using both my Mac as a client and our 3D workstations (Linux). I was quite impressed with the large amount of out of the box ability. So far I have been able to make the following formats work as both static images and video:
- VASP OUTCAR
- Protein Databank (ent)
- CGNS
- Simple HDF5
- Fluent
- Flash
I plan to try a few others, TecPlot, XYZ and NetCDF to name a few.
I must stress that Visit will not run in parallel using the binaries provided by LLNL on the Visit website. You will need to compile it your self, but to do this the Visit devs have made a build_visit script you can find on their website. It was very easy on our RHEL4 machine with OpenMPI-1.2.3 with gcc-3.4 to build. A few libraries it tries to do will fail. Mili is not available yet so deselect it from the available plugins. Also h5Part would not build for me though HDF5 does just fine. Just disable these.
Note DO NOT run visit over a slow line, in this case your highspeed Comcast is not fast enough, the machine running the client should be on the same lan as the cluster or have at-least a 100Mbps available to the client at anytime. Second never X-forward the client, it will look bad and work awful. Last make sure your Linux machine supports hardware GL (We use Nvidia SLI for our 30" displays). If you use the Windows or Mac client this should already be done for you but for larger models a cheap graphics card will hurt you.
The largest render I have done used 16 cpus and chewed a 4.5GB HDF5 file from lusture to my display at the 3d lab in around 45 seconds. This file was way to simple so YMMV.
If you are a U of M student/staff/faculty who wants to know more about tools like Visit please contact me. I would love to help you out.
Example Images:
Example Movie:
