VisIt 1.10 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 team released a patch release, version 1.9.1, to fix some critical defects that surfaced in the VisIt 1.9 release. Descriptions of the defects addressed by the patch release can be found in the VisIt 1.9.1 release notes. All version 1.9.1 fixes are included in this release.
- The mesh quality metrics have been updated to use the latest version of the Verdict library. This affects the mesh quality metrics as well as all calculations involving the volume of an element. More information can be found in the Features for all users section.
- The streamline plot has been significantly improved. More information can be found in the Changes to plots section.

Sections

- Features for all users
- Features for advanced users
- Changes to file format readers
- Changes to plots
- Changes to operators
- Changes to expressions
- Changes to picks and queries
- Changes to the command line interface
- Other bug fixes
- Changes to machine configuration files
- Changes for VisIt developers

General features added in version 1.10

- The mesh quality metrics have been updated to use Verdict version 110. The new version calculates shear and hexahedral volumes more accurately. The Verdict volume metric is used for all volume calculations in VisIt, so any calculations that involve calculating the volume of a hexahedral element may change. This includes many queries such as volume, centroid, center of mass, and spherical compactness.
- Initial support for internationalization has been added. This allows the GUI to be translated into languages other than English, following standard Qt internationalization procedures.
- The performance was improved for data sets with many domains (or patches) as well as large AMR data sets.
- Queries that accept variables for input now have a variable widget for ease of entry.
- The Overlay button has been changed so that it only creates new copies of the selected plots in the plot list instead of copying all plots in the plot list. The new behavior results in far fewer unwanted plots when using overlay to create new plots with a different database. Overlay was also changed so that it is possible to overlay plots from a specific database time step.
- The Subset window is now considerably faster when selecting over a large number of domains.
- The Pick Window has two new buttons: Repeat Pick will repeat a pick at the same location as the previous pick without displaying a new pick letter but using possibly updated attributes (e.g., showing additional variables). Display in Spreadsheet will show the previous pick location in a Spreadsheet plot.

Advanced features added in version 1.10

- VisIt now attempts to use the loopback device (127.0.0.1) for all local connections. This should fix many startup failures on platforms which are related to networking issues like VPN, incorrect hostnames, or firewalls blocking ports on external interfaces. To disable this feature, add the "-noloopback" argument when starting visit.
- VisIt now supports the IceT library for improved rendering times. IceT requires a parallel version of VisIt, and is only supported in scalable rendering mode. Use the `-icet` command line option to enable use of IceT for a session.
- VisIt's plugin managers have been reworked so that multiple instances can coexist in the same process. This enables simulations that are instrumented with libsim (and are thus VisIt compute engines) to include other VisIt components such as the VisIt Python interface. A simulation that is both a VisIt CLI and a VisIt compute engine can create plots using VisIt's normal Python scripting but also generate the plotted data as a simulation.
- SSH port forwarding now includes more local tunnelled ports. This helps use port forwarding with more than one engine.
- When all components of VisIt have been built with a version of Mesa which supports large offscreen images, VisIt will allow you to save images up to a resolution of 16k2.
- The "visitconvert" file converter tool now allows the user to set values for the writing file format options. It also now supports the -assume_format and -default_format input plugin specification arguments.

File format reader changes in version 1.10

- VisIt now supports the UNIC file format.
- VisIt now supports the PFLOTRAN file format, including automatic decomposition of data for parallel I/O and computation.
- The FLASH reader has been enhanced to read particles of file format version 9. The reader should now read all files with particles.
- The FLASH reader has been fixed to, again, prevent coincident blocks from different refinement levels from being drawn over one another.
- The Tecplot reader has received several enhancements:
  - The reader can read binary Tecplot files.
  - It now handles DOS-formatted text files correctly.
  - The curves it generates can now be used in expressions
  - It supports newer versions of the Tecplot ASCII format specification.
  - It will now correctly guess coordinate variables even with units (e.g. "meters") in the variable names
- The XDMF reader has been fixed so that it no longer causes memory problems when reading meshes of type VxVyVz, which are curvilinear meshes where the coordinates exist in separate HDF5 arrays.
- The XDMF reader has been fixed so that it can also read HDF data items of type char, unsigned char, int, and unsigned int. It could already read float and double.
- The XDMF reader now supports a BaseIndex attribute as an Information field in a Grid. The BaseIndex specifies the location of a structured grid within either a rectilinear or curvilinear multiblock mesh.
- VisIt now supports various changes made in the Nek3D file format.
- The BOV reader has been optimized to perform better when using a large number of processors. Previously, all of VisIt's processors read the same header file simultaneously, which severely affects parallel performance on some machines. In addition, the BOV reader now correctly supports large (4GB or more) files.
- The VTK reader will now read 'CYCLE' from the FieldData (both legacy and xml formats). It also fully supports the 'Try harder to get accurate cycles/times' option.
- The EnSight reader now correctly supports wildcard substitution in EnSight files.
- VisIt automatically adds mesh quality expressions for curvilinear and unstructured meshes. However, it limits the number of expressions it adds (when faced with a large number of meshes) to not incur performance costs. The mechanism for choosing which meshes receive the mesh quality expressions has been improved to pick the most important meshes.
- A crash was fixed for the TimeVaryingExodus file format.
- The DDCMD reader was enhanced to support reading 'b' field types and to be able to plot the stress tensor.
- The PlainText reader now generates curves which can be used in expressions. It also always exposes the coordinate arrays as variables to mitigate the repercussions of incorrect coordinate-variable guessing.
- The CHGCAR (VASP) reader can now both automatically domain decompose data files when reading them, allowing these readers to obtain speedups through both parallel I/O and parallel computation.
- The Vista/Diablo format no longer crashes on some 64-bit systems.
- The Protein Data Bank format now exposes the Temperature and Occupancy Factor columns as new variables.
- An off by one error was fixed in the PDB reader, ensuring that the correct material names are used.
- The VASP, TFT, MM5, basic NETCDF, FITS, Cale and Silo readers now generate curves which can be used in expressions.

Changes to VisIt's plots in version 1.10

- The Streamline plot has been significantly improved.
  - It can now integrate streamlines across domain boundaries.
  - It now works correctly in both serial and parallel (including distributed memory parallelism).
  - It has a parallel processing mode that allows for parallelization to occur over streamlines, allowing for large data sets to be processed with limited resources. This mode requires ghost data and knowledge of the extents of each domain. If that data is not available, it can still create correct streamlines, albeit by processing all the domains.
  - The integration methods are more numerically correct than those previously used.
  - Two dimensional streamlines can no longer be easily obscured by other plots, such as the Pseudocolor plot.
- The Spreadsheet plot's data window has been fixed on the MacOS X platform so the File, Edit, and Operations menu are once again available as they are on other platforms.
- Ray-casted volume rendering would sometimes incorrectly cull away domains with non-square windows. This bug has been fixed.
- The Histogram plot now does its default weighting by frequency.
- The Vector plot now has the ability to only show one vector per original cell or node. This is useful when making Vector plots from data which has been clipped -- or any similar process which divides cells or creates new nodes. This option is enabled by default.
- The Vector plot now uses the "Restrict to" number of vectors as a value over the whole problem, not just a single domain. This improves consistency between single- and multi-block problems, and for file formats which automatically decompose data for a variable number of processors.
- Curve plots now have labels if they were loaded from files or generated by expressions or queries.

Changes to VisIt's operators in version 1.10

- A memory issue with the Clip operator was fixed. This issue led to intermittent crashes previously.
- VisIt now provides a "Dual Mesh Operator" to aid with using the resample operator on images. This operator only works on rectilinear grids and creates the dual mesh of the input, with the following two conversion modes:
  - Nodes to Zones: Creates output zones centered at input nodes and converts point data to cell data
  - Zones to Nodes: Creates output nodes centered at input zone centers and converts cell data to point data.
  You can explicitly choose how you want to convert or use Auto, which looks at the primary variable to determine the proper direction.
For conversion examples see: http://visitusers.org/index.php?title=Dual_Mesh_Operator
- The Transform Operator now supports an arbitrary 3x3 linear transform matrix.
- A problem with using the Box Operator on Curves was fixed.

Changes to VisIt's expression language in version 1.10

- There is a new exp function for calculating en.
- There is a new transpose function for tensor data.
- The Laplacian function was reimplemented for rectilinear data to be more efficient and to only require a single layer of ghost cells.
- The area and revolved volume functions now support arbitrary 2D polygons.
- New functions for min_corner_angle and max_corner_angle were added. This function is not exposed by default, as it gives ambiguous answers vis-a-vis arcsin.
- In the past, expressions have often gotten confused as to whether they are scalars or vectors. This issue should be much improved.
- The expression language now supports using backslashes to escape the next character. For example, some variable names like "dist (cm)" can now be specified either using the original quoting mechanism, i.e. `<dist (cm)>`, or with backslashes, i.e. `dist\ \(cm\)`
- Backslashes may also be used as directory separators in file names. Note, however, that due to the backslash-escaping mechanism, you must use two successive backslashes here, e.g. `\\path\\to\\file.vtk`. This is only a convenience; forward slashes still work the same as before.

Changes to VisIt's picks and queries in version 1.10

- Query-over-time of a non-default variable now uses the correct variable name and units in the legend.
- Pick-through-time now uses the variable name and units for the y-axis labels.
- Pick no longer gets confused about which variable to use when performed after a doing a Query of a non-default variable.
- Pick now works on time-curves.
- Queries such as NumNodes and Variable Sum now work correctly with material selection enabled.
- The area and revolved volume queries now support arbitrary 2D polygons.
- The Hohlraum Flux query now does a better job of issuing warnings in error conditions and not crashing. Also, this query now gives output in full double precision.
- The Shapelet Decomposition query was updated to retain the original spatial extents in the recomposition output.

Changes to VisIt's command-line interface in version 1.10

- The OverlayDatabase function now accepts an optional second argument for specifying a time state.
- When bringing up the CLI from the GUI's Controls->Command window, it is no longer necessary to enter a string to activate the Execute button. (The CLI can now be launched directly without a dummy command.)
- Python callbacks no longer fail silently. If you have registered a function with an incorrect signature, you will now get a proper error message.
- A hang when attempting OpenGUI() from the cli on Windows has been fixed.

Other bugs fixed in version 1.10

- If you combine a ray-casted volume rendering with transparent geometry, VisIt now issues an error message and no longer hangs.
- The "visit -movie" movie generation script once again can detect the engine configuration used to generate the plots in a session file and can reuse that configuration when generating a movie.
- For windows platforms, running visit -cli -o, visit -cli -s, or double-clicking a .py now correctly parses paths and works correctly.
- Macro recording for 2D zooming no longer produces invalid Python code for setting the 2D view attributes.
- Macro creation now does more checking to make sure that macro names are valid, which prevents problems when the macros are actually registered.
- VisIt's libsim library used a non-zero idle timeout that slowed down polling simulations.
- Restore session from sources now works again.
- VisIt displays the files from localhost in the File panel when the -launchengine argument is provided to launch a remote compute engine.
- If you apply a resample operator to a FilledBoundary plot, VisIt now issues a warning and no longer crashes.
- On Macs, if you used the Variables dropdown to change the variable of a plot and if that variable was invalid (e.g. a bad expression), then VisIt will no longer crash.
- The "Lock Tools" icon in the toolbar is now grouped correctly with the other "Lock" icons.
- The deprecated Parallel Axis plot has been removed. Use the new Parallel Coordinates plot instead.
- Issues with log-log scaling of mulitple curves have been resolved.
- VisIt's check for X11 terminals on Mac OS X has been improved.
- Materials defined on point meshes in an instrumented simulation cannot be plotted successfully.

Changes to configuration files in version 1.10

- Host profiles for ORNL's visualization cluster, lens, have been added.
- Host profiles for ORNL's Cray XT4/5, jaguar, have been added.
- The host profiles for LLNL's yana system have been modified to use SLURM and Moab.
- The host profiles for LLNL's hopi system have been modified to use SLURM and Moab.
- The parallel hardware accelerated host profile for LLNL's gauss cluster has been modified for Chaos 4.
- The host profiles for LLNL's up system have been modified to use Moab.
- "-switch ib" has been removed from all of LLNL's host profiles since it is no longer necessary.

Changes for VisIt developers in version 1.10

- Development on Windows can now be done directly from the SVN repository, as the build process has been modified to use the native source tree instead of a modified one.
- The Klocwork tool was applied to VisIt and many potential bugs were found and fixed.
- The method for running all of VisIt's perl scripts was changed, making launching somewhat simpler, internally.
- The source code was improved to reduce the number of compiler warnings.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the previous version of VisIt: VisIt 1.9 Release Notes.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the next version of VisIt: VisIt 1.11.0 Release Notes.