How to use VisIt, the Visualization Tool (CMT)

Jisamma Kallumadikal

June 2010

1.    What is VisIt?

VisIt is a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms. Users can quickly generate visualizations from their data, animate them through time, manipulate them, and save the resulting images for presentations. VisIt contains a rich set of visualization features so that you can view your data in a variety of ways. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the tera- to peta-scale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range. For more information see https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/.

Objectives of this guide

This guide explains how to visualize data using VisIt through CMT.

a. Please see the CSDMS wiki for details on how to install VisIt for CMT: http://csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/Help:Ccaffeine_GUI#VisIt_-_Introduction

b. Once VisIt is installed, follow these steps to visualize data through CMT:

i. Click on the VisIt tab (to the right of Arena).

ii. Select the file

iii. Click the ‘Connect’ button. This will connect to the remote machine if the file resides on CSDMS HPCC or on your local machine if it is a local file.

iv. As soon as the file is read, click the ‘Get Plots’ button. CMT will then access the plots for the selected file.

v. Now the drop lists will show all the available types of plots and types of variable that can be used to visualize the data. Both the plot type and the variable type must be selected to proceed.

vi. Click on the ‘VisIt Plot’ button to visualize the data. This opens the VisIt application. From here on, VisIt and all of its features can be used as a stand-alone application, or through CMT as described in the above steps.