Visualization

External documentation for popular visualization packages

ParaView

ParaView is a general-purpose 3D scientific visualization tool. It is open source and compiles on all popular platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac), understands a large number of input file formats, provides multiple rendering modes, supports Python scripting, and can scale up to tens of thousands of processors for rendering of very large datasets.

• ParaView official documentation
• ParaView gallery
• ParaView wiki
• ParaView Python scripting

VisIt

Similar to ParaView, VisIt is an open-source, general-purpose 3D scientific data analysis and visualization tool that scales from interactive analysis on laptops to very large HPC projects on tens of thousands of processors.

• VisIt manuals
• VisIt gallery
• VisIt user community wiki
• VisIt tutorials along with sample datasets

VMD

VMD is an open-source molecular visualization program for displaying, animating, and analyzing large biomolecular systems in 3D. It supports scripting in Tcl and Python and runs on a variety of platforms (MacOS X, Linux, Windows). It reads many molecular data formats using an extensible plugin system and supports a number of different molecular representations.

• VMD User's Guide

VTK

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an open-source package for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization. It consists of a C++ class library and several interpreted interface layers including Tcl/Tk, Java, and Python. VTK is the base of many excellent visualization packages including ParaView and VisIt.

• VTK tutorials

Visualization on new Compute Canada systems

This section will be updated as the new systems start coming online beginning in the fall 2016.

Upcoming visualization events

• October 2016 visualization challenge - details will be posted in September 2016
• fall visualization webinars: September, November
• fall visualization workshops: UBC, UVic, SFU

Compute Canada visualization presentation materials

Workshops

• VisIt workshop slides from HPCS'2016 in Edmonton by Marcelo Ponce and Alex Razoumov
• ParaView workshop slides from UBC Okanagan by Alex Razoumov
• Gnuplot, xmgrace, remote visualization tools (X-forwarding and VNC), python's matplotlib slides by Marcelo Ponce from Ontario HPC Summer School 2016
• Brief overview of ParaView & VisIt slides by Marcelo Ponce from Ontario HPC Summer School 2016

Webinars

• Batch visualization webinar slides from March 2015 by Alex Razoumov
• Gephi webinar notes from March 2016 by Alex Razoumov
• 3D graphs with NetworkX, VTK, and ParaView slides from May 2016 by Alex Razoumov

Regional visualization pages

WestGrid

• visualization quickstart guide
• remote visualization
• batch rendering

SciNet, HPC at the University of Toronto

• visualization software
• Remote visualization (X-forwarding and VNC)
• VNC
• visualization nodes
• further resources and viz-tech talks
• using ParaView
• VisIt Basics
• Intro to Complex Networks Visualization, with Python

Visualization gallery

You can find a gallery of visualizations based on models run on Compute Canada systems in the visualization gallery.

How to get visualization help

You can contact us via email.