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## Managing compute engines

VisIt can have many compute engines running at the same time. Much of the time the compute engines are those that are installed with VisIt but on occasion, simulation codes may be instrumented to act as VisIt compute engines capable of performing visualization operations on simulation data as it is created. When a simulation is used as a VisIt compute engine, VisIt can access data directly from the simulation without the need to translate data into another format or write it out to disk. When simulations are instrumented to become VisIt compute engines, they have all of the abilities of the standard VisIt compute engine and more. Specifically, simulations can accept additional simulation-defined control commands in order to make them perform actions such as writing a restart file. Since simulations offer extra capabilities over a normal VisIt compute engine, VisIt provides different windows in order to manage them. In order to manage compute engines and check on progress, VisIt provides a Compute Engine Window. VisIt provides the Simulation Window in order to manage simulations, display their progress, and provide extra controls for the simulations.