Scientific Visualization

Instructor: Marcelo Ponce
SciNet - University Toronto, Canada

* SLIDES https://www.hpc-training.org/moodle/pluginfile.php/3399/mod_page/content/15/ihpcss2019_ScientificVisualization.pdf

Visualization refers to techniques employed for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message.

Scientific Visualization, in particular, is the representation of data in a visual manner, utilizing standardized techniques to explore the data.

To visualize complex data and ensemble complicated combinations of these techniques, we employ specialized software, usually known as “visualization suites”.

This session, will consist of a mix of lecture and hands-on to introduce scientific visualization using VisIt (https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/visit/), an open-source, cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac) visualization suite.

* Topics to cover will include: introduction to basics of visualization, visualization pipelines, scalar and vector fields representations, techniques to analyze multidimensional datasets, and movies generation.

* Prerequisites: No prior experience with scientific visualization is necessary.

Participants will need to bring their own laptops and should have VisIt installed on their laptops before the course, https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/visit/executables -- we recommend installing VisIt ver 2.12.x.

* FFMPEG: Rendering utility for movie generation https://www.ffmpeg.org

Time depending we may also cover the following topics:

* Scripting:  https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/~mponce/courses/datasets/visit/scripts.zip

* Remote Visualization -- Bridges host profile file: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/~mponce/viz/host_bridges.xml