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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Full-day 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 and shorter presentations
- 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
- Remote visualization (X-forwarding and VNC), slides by Ramses van Zon from October 2015 SciNet User Group Meeting
- VisIt Basics, slides by Marcelo Ponce from February 2016 SciNet User Group Meeting
- Intro to Complex Networks Visualization, with Python, slides by Marcelo Ponce
Tips and tricks
Regional visualization pages
WestGrid
SciNet, HPC at the University of Toronto
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.