VisIt 2.13.1 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

- Bug Fixes
- Enhancements
- Changes for VisIt developers

Bugs fixed in version 2.13.1

- Modified query over time to store the results in double precision instead of single precision.
- Modified the VTK Reader to ensure material scalars in multi-block datasets are read correctly.
- Modified VisIt to display an error message on Windows if VISITSSH is defined, but does not point to an executable, and if a parallel engine is requested but mpiexec.exe cannot be found.
- Corrected a bug with the ScatterPlot Setup Wizard populating the variable menus from a previous database.
- Corrected a bug with the Threshold operator thresholding point meshes.
- Corrected a bug where VisIt would crash when performing a lineout when -dump was specified on the command line.
- Enhanced VisIt's viewer to address a performance issue where it unnecessarily created text labels that would likely not be used unless displaying a ParallelCoordinates plot. For Subset plots with large numbers of domains, this caused the viewer to use many gigabytes of memory even when scalable rendering was used.
- Corrected a bug where VisIt would crash performing a time-query when the Curve plot was disabled. An error message will now be issued, and the query will not be performed.
- Corrected a bug with build_visit with the building of Qt with -no-openssl specified on the command line on Fedora systems.
- Modified the exporting of data to Silo files to always set the MetadataIsTimeVarying attribute to ensure VisIt handles exported data correctly in cases where the metadata is time-varying. This will probably result in a minimal performance degradation in cases where its not necessary.
- Corrected a bug where VisIt would crash opening certain NetCDF-4 files on Windows.
- Corrected a bug where VisIt would crash when the number of nodes or zones or tuples times the number of components exceeds INT_MAX in a single block.
- Corrected a bug with the Save Window compression options so that only those options appropriate to the currently selected format are enabled for selection.
- Corrected a bug with the active window selector in the main window so that it now displays more than a single digit if necessary.
- Corrected a bug with running Python filters in parallel on Windows.
- Corrected a bug where VisIt would hang on start up when running on a Windows VM.
- Corrected a bug with Python filters failing on Windows 8, 10.
- Corrected a bug where the VisIt metadata server would crash when it encounterd a Silo file with a multimesh that was invalid, such as when the number of blocks specified was zero.
- Modified VisIt so that crash session files created by any running VisIt process are correctly ignored by any additional VisIt processes that are launched.

Enhancements in version 2.13.1

- Enhanced the SPCTH reader to process a list of MTMD files as one MTMD file.
- Modified the parallel interactive pdebug host profile for the LLNL cab machine to handle job launching changes on the machine.
- Modified the parallel viz host profile for the LANL trinity machine to handle job launching changes on the machine.
- Enhanced the Pixie reader to read datasets with more than INT_MAX nodes or zones.
- Changed the default compression method for saving windows from PackBits to None.
- Improved the performance of VisIt when populating file lists from directories with large numbers of entries.
- Modified VisIt to save crash session files for a specific VisIt process. The user can choose which crash session file to restore if multiple ones exist.
- Enhanced VisIt to select between chaos 5 and toss 3 executables on LLNL systems based on the machine name instead of the environment variable SYS_TYPE. Some users didn't have the SYS_TYPE environment variable set causing the previous logic to fail in some instances.
- Removed the host profiles for the LLNL rzgpu machine.
- Added host profiles for the LLNL rzhasgpu machine.

Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.13.1

- Modified build_visit to pass the zlib directory information to the configure command for hdf5 when -zlib was specified on the command line.
- Modified build_visit to patch pyside2 to remove the conditional collecting of the Multimedia, WebEngineWidget, and WebKit modules.
- Corrected a bug with the creation of a QWT symbolic link on OSX.
- Corrected a bug with the naming of the PySide2 and Shiboken2 libraries on OSX.
- Modified build_visit to build Qt in silent mode by default. Additionally, build_visit was modified to allow specifying --no-qt-silent on the command line to disable building Qt in silent mode.
- Changed the location where the default variables are set in the viewer so that plot plugins can override the default values in their CustomizeBehavior method.
- Upgraded Numpy from version 1.11.2 to 1.14.1.
- Enhanced the Python CLI to make it possible to the control visibility of annotation objects during their creation with an additional argument in the CreateAnnotationObject() method.
- Modified Make package so that it no longer includes any directories named icons. Previously, this resulted in a couple of invalid symbolic links being added to the distribution file.
- Upgraded Uintah from version 2.1.0 to 2.5.0 beta.
- Upgraded GDAL from version 1.10.0 to 2.2.4.
- Upgraded Conduit from version 0.3.0 to 0.3.1.
- Modified build_visit to patch BoxLib so that it would compile with newer versions of GCC.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the previous version of VisIt: 2.13.