VisIt 1.11 Release Notes
Welcome to VisIt's release notes page. This page describes the important
enhancements and bug-fixes that were added to this release.
Announcements
- The VisIt 1.11 release was made on an abbreviated schedule. Our project decided to make this release early to
catch up to our regular release schedule, which had slipped with the 1.10 release. We strive to have four major
releases per year.
Sections
General features added in version 1.11
- The mesh plot was greatly tuned for rectilinear meshes, including
AMR rectilinear meshes. You should see considerable improvement in
both performance and memory footprint.
- The material interface reconstruction was tuned for the case of a domain
that has only a single material. Again, you should see considerable
improvement in both performance and memory footprint.
- You can now change legends to have a horizontal orientation, as opposed
to the traditional vertical orientation. To access the controls (as
well as other legend controls), bring up the Annotation window
by selecting the Controls->Annotation menu entry in the main
GUI and look under the Objects tab.
- The 3d axes have been enhanced to allow the user to specify the major
and minor tick mark locations for each of the axes. In order to set
them bring up the Annotation window, select the 3D tab,
turn off the Auto set ticks button, and then specify the major
tick mark minimum, major tick mark maxium, minor tick mark spacing and
major tick mark spacing for each of the axes.
Advanced features added in version 1.11
- VisIt now supports hardware based rendering for clusters with
multiple GPUs per node. The previous -hw-accel interface
is preserved. Therefore no host profile modifications will be
necessary, but you must update your VisIt host profiles if you'd
like to use more than one GPU. For full information, see the wiki
page: http://www.visitusers.org/index.php?title=Parallel_Hardware_Acceleration.
- Libsim.a is now being compiled with the flags "-fPIC", so that it is
possible to build a shared library from it.
File format reader changes in version 1.11
- Ralph Bruckschen contributed the new Gadget file reader for data from
the Gadget 2 cosmological N-body/SPH simulation code. Thank you, Ralph!
- The Silo reader no longer crashes when reading multimat objects whose
material entries are all set to "EMPTY".
- The PDB/Flash file reader has been changed so that it does not allow
VisIt to cache data since the reader performs its own caching.
- The Silo reader now supports decomposed domain boundaries for
Rectilinear meshes.
- The configuration for the ITAPS reader has changed to support multiple
implementations of ITAPS libraries in one installation of VisIt. The
new configuration switch is --with-itaps-impls=[very long string]
which defines all the features of each ITAPS implementation VisIt is
to be compiled with. Each implementation leads to an ITAPS database
reader plugin with a different name. See DEFAULT_ITAPS_IMPLS
specification in config-site/hoth.llnl.gov for further explanation
and an example.
- The MFIX reader will now work correctly when run on a big-endian
machine. The reader still assumes the data file is big-endian. If this is
not the case, the user can tell VisIt this via the Database Options
available when opening the file.
- The PlainText reader now supports curves where any column can
represent the abscissa.
- The Tecplot file format now supports cell-centered variables (through
the VARLOCATION keyword).
- The SAMRAI reader now works on Windows.
- The Dune reader has been fixed to work on Windows.
- Reading virtual databases of FLASH format data now works on Windows.
Changes to VisIt's plots in version 1.11
- The Volume plot's ray-casting option now has a lighting model. This
results in significantly higher quality pictures, at the cost of more
computation time. To use the old (faster) way, disable lighting in the
plot options.
- The Streamline plot has three new color by options: time, arc length
and seed point id.
- The Volume plot's ray-casting option no longer has additional,
unnecessary executions when making its first image.
- The Spreadsheet plot now prints an informational message in text files
that it saves so the user knows that the vertical ordering of data
in the file differs from what is shown in the plot.
- The Volume plot can now directly volume render unsigned character data
with no intermediate representations, meaning that the memory footprint
will now be lower in this case.
- The Molecule plot no longer shortens bonds in degenerate cases.
Changes to VisIt's operators in version 1.11
- The InverseGhostZone operator now operates correctly on blocks that
have no ghost zones.
- The Slice operator now labels axes differently when projecting to two
dimensions. It has always correctly labeled the axes when doing
orthogonal slices. However, for non-orthogonal slices, it was
consistently labeling the axes as X and Y, even though
those were not the true axes. It will now label the axes with the true
axes, for example the 0.707,0,-0.707 Axis.
- Deleting an operator by clicking the red X in the plot list now works
for plots that are not selected.
- The Tube operator can now scale the tube by a scalar variable.
- The Tube operator now successfully works on line segments that form
loops, where these segments would previously be ignored.
- The Threshold operator now issues a warning if you are thresholding by
the default variable and that variable is not a scalar.
- When the Slice operator is projecting to two dimensions and the slice
plane is set using the theta-phi method, users can now set the up-axis
for projection to two dimensions.
Changes to VisIt's expression language in version 1.11
- Extra logic was added to the conn_components expression to to validate
ghost zones before attempting to use the ghost zone neighbors
optimization.
- Recursive expressions no longer kill the engine.
Changes to VisIt's picks and queries in version 1.11
- Fixed more cases of failure in the NumNodes query.
- VisIt no longer crashes when performing a query over time for the
PickByNode and PickByZone queries if you accidentally apply the queries
to a Mesh plot.
- Fixed an error in the GUI with parsing the output file name for the
"Connected Components Summary" Query.
Other bugs fixed in version 1.11
- VisIt should be significantly better at cleaning up runaway parallel
engines.
- A bug was fixed with Fedora Core 9 where "Save Window" and images from
"Scalable rendering mode" ("SR mode") were coming out corrupted.
- SR mode now detects when only the root process creates an image, and
adjusts composition appropriately. This fixes a bug which caused the
volume plot to create images with visible slices.
- If file grouping is set to off and you connect to a remote host,
the files on the remote machine now display correctly, where previously
it would appear as an empty list.
- Fixed the usage of the loopback device (127.0.0.1) for Windows.
- Fixed a small memory leak on the Windows platfrom.
- The parallel compute engine wrapper library has been linked with the
cognomen library, allowing it to work in parallel with libsim once
more.
- VisIt's expression evaluator frees up more problem-sized memory as it
evaluates expressions, making it less likely that the compute engine
will run out of memory.
- The CLI's OpenGUI() function no longer causes the viewer to crash when
the viewer is run without a window using the -nowin command line
argument.
- The "visit -movie" script now properly handles engine launch
arguments.
- VisIt's Save Movie wizard no longer presents "Streaming movie" as an
option unless the img2sm encoding software exists in your path.
- Modified the component launcher code on windows to not override
VISITSSH or VISITSSHARGS if set in the users's environment.
- The windows installer once again allows the user to copy over old
config files to the new version.
- VisIt no longer reverts to displaying files from your home directory
when the -launchengine argument is added to the command line as
a result of adding parallel command line arguments such as -np, -nn.
- Replaced the use of bzip2 compression with libz compression for data sent
from engine to viewer. Empirical results show better compression and
performance with libz.
- A significant memory bloat was found and fixed for the case of
processing double precision data.
- SIL correctness checking was modified to keep enumerated scalar
selection from influencing material selection. This resolves an issue
with selecting materials when Nodelists are present.
- Restoring sessions while running remotely via cygwin or XWin32 will
no longer cause the main GUI window to be un-sizeable.
- The legend font height can now be set using the Python interface's legend
annotation object.
- The Windows version is no longer missing some LLNL host profiles.
Changes to configuration files in version 1.11
- The host profiles for ORNL's visualization cluster, lens, was updated
to include support for launching multi-GPU parallel engines.
- Host profiles for LLNL's juno and eos systems have been added.
- Host profiles for LLNL's tempest machine have been added.
- The host profiles for LLNL's purple, um and uv systems have been
modified to use SLURM and Moab.
- The host profiles for the LANL Q machine were removed since it no
longer exists.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 1.11
- Project files for VC 8 were updated to allow successful compilation
in parallel.
- VisIt now tries to compile and link with a shared hdf5 library.
- VisIt binary distributions will use a shared hdf5 library.
- VisIt no longer requires Silo in order to compile.
- --with-szip configuration option has been removed because VisIt does
not directly depend on the szip library. It may, however, depend on
szip indirectly (see below).
- --with-hdf5 option supports specification of additional libraries upon
which hdf5 depends by using a colon (':') separator followed by a
comma separated list of flags to link against hdf5.
- Config site file symbols for HDF5 changed to DEFAULT_HDF5_LIBLOC and,
optionally, DEFAULT_HDF5_LIBDEP. See confit-site/hoth.llnl.gov.conf
for an example.
- New VAC_ARG_WITH3RD autoconf macro should be used to handle third
party libraries.
- libz was added as a third party builtin and bzip2 was removed.
- The build_visit script was refactored so that all patch code is now
cleanly isolated into their own separate function.
Click the following link to view the release notes for the previous version
of VisIt: VisIt 1.10 Release Notes.