VisIt 2.5 Release Notes
Welcome to VisIt's release notes page. This page describes the important
enhancements and bug-fixes that were added to this release.
Sections
General features added in version 2.5
Advanced features added in version 2.5
- Selections have been enhanced so they offer multiple ways to index cells in a mesh. For example, it is now possible to identify cells using their domain and local cell number, global cell number, or by a user-specified variable such as a particle ID. The domain and local cell number and global cell number indexing schemes are useful for domain-decomposed data whose mesh connectivity does not change. The variable indexing scheme is good for domain-decomposed data and situations where mesh connectivity changes across domains and time. You can specify the type of indexing to use when you create a new selection and you can alter the selection's properties in the Selections window.
- William T. Jones extended libsim so it supports ghost nodes. Thanks William!
- Libsim was enhanced to provide a function that lets you set the MPI communicator that VisIt should use. Pass an address to the communicator to VisItSetMPICommunicator(void*) if you want to make VisIt use a user-defined communicator. Passing NULL will make VisIt use its copy of the world communicator.
- The VisIt Python Interface now provides a function called WriteScript that tries to write the current state of VisIt as a Python program that can be executed later.
Changes in GUI behavior for version 2.5
- Color table buttons in the gui now show an icon depicting the colors in the color table.
- Color tables can now use cubic spline interpolation between colors to make smoother transitions than the default linear scheme. The default color tables remain linear but you can change the interpolation yourself.
- Added a Controls menu option to directly launch VisIt's command line interface (CLI), if an instance of the CLI is not already active.
File format reader changes in version 2.5
- Joel Welling contributed an MFIXCDF reader.
- Joel Welling contributed changes to the MFIX reader that change how it performs domain decomposition.
- The EnSight file format reader now supports materials.
- VisIt's NETCDF reader now supports conventions for missing data. The missing_value, _FillValue, valid_min, valid_max, valid_range attributes are supported.
- VisIt's NETCDF reader now supports the scale_factor and add_offset attributes, using them to transform packed char and short data into double-precision.
- The BOW reader was obsolete so it was removed.
- VisIt's Dyna3D reader can now read material models 10 and 15.
- Bob Corey updated the Mili reader.
- Bob Corey corrected a bug in makemili, where not all the variables present in the Mili file were made available for plotting.
- The paraDIS reader was fixed so it will read the entire dataset on Windows.
- The CGNS reader was fixed so that VisIt won't crash when reading a large number of grouped files.
- The Silo reader was enhanced to read gmap extensions which identify periodic boundary conditions and avoid ghosting of these boundaries.
Changes to VisIt's plots in version 2.5
- VisIt's Spreadsheet plot now supports missing data, marking them in the spreadsheet with a reddish gray background color.
Changes to VisIt's expression language in version 2.5
- The cross expression, which performs a cross product, now produces a scalar when crossing two dimensional vectors, as the magnitude of the direction out of the plane.
- The value_for_materiral, and matvf expressions now work properly with AMR datasets.
Changes to VisIt's picks and queries in version 2.5
- Scatter Plots can now be picked.
Other bugs fixed in version 2.5
- Named selections now correctly select the right cells when FastBit indexing is used.
- Libsim's routines for setting rectlinear and AMR domain boundary indices are now properly getting called in the simulation runtime library.
- The PersistentParticles operator no longer causes the compute engine to exit when it is applied to a Mesh plot.
- Stereo rendering now works properly. It was broken in versions of VisIt after the VTK upgrade in VisIt 2.4.0.
- Slicing and Contouring of data on unstructured meshes containing polyhedral cells no longer causes VisIt's compute engine to eventually crash.
- Enabling keyframing no longer crashes the viewer.
Changes to configuration files in version 2.5
- Host profiles for LLNL's CZ clusters have been changed to use SSH tunneling so Windows users should be able to run client/server without having to modify host profiles.
- Host profiles were added for LLNL's rzmerl cluster.
- Host profiles were added for LLNL's oslic cluster.
- Host profiles were added for LLNL's zin cluster.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.5
- Visual Studio 2010 support was added.
Click the following link to view the release notes for the previous version
of VisIt: VisIt 2.4.2 Release Notes.