VisIt Changelog

What's new in VisIt 3.4.1

Apr 11, 2024

Bugs fixed in version 3.4.1:
Fixed a bug in the Wavefront OBJ Writer that would result in incorrect coloring for minimum or maximum values in downstream tools such as PowerPoint.
Fixed a bug with Pick unable to return results for 2D datasets.
Fixed a bug where vtk error messages were printed to the terminal when adding an Image Annotation Object to the viewer window.
Changed default logic for guessing cycles from file names to not consider any digits in the file name extension if present. This fixed the guessing logic for cases where a file extension includes a digit (e.g. .h5m)
Fixed a bug where glyphed line endpoints could be colored incorrectly in the Pseudocolor plot.
Fixed a VTK Texture Buffer error that caused error messages to be printed to the command line.
Fixed a Mesh plot bug where transparency would not be honored.
Fixed compile error where some executable targets were missing QSurfaceFormat include.
Fixed a Volume plot but that would cause the parallel engine to crash when certain operators were used in conjunction with the plot.
Fixed a Cube reader bug that didn’t read in multiple orbital data files correctly.
Fixed a bug with the Expression window that caused the ‘Python’ editor to be the default tab when the window was first opened.
Fixed a bug with the Cartographic Projection operator where the projections were a no-op.
Removed custom logic forcing the opacity slider to snap to zero if the mouse dragged the slider outside the widget it belongs to.
Fixed a bug in the Blueprint reader causing unstructured point topologies to display incorrectly if they did not use all of the provided coordinates.
Removed sxterm host profile options for LLNL LSF Machines. sxterm is not available on these systems.
Several bugs were fixed in UNV plugin including fixing normals for quads.
Fixed a problem with global node ids on point meshes from Silo plugin.
Fixed a bug in the Wavefront OBJ Writer that caused zonal variables saved out using the writer to have some incorrect colors in downstream tools such as PowerPoint.
Fixed srun launch issues on LLNL TOSS4 systems.
Enhancements in version 3.4.1:
Added the ability to invert the color table for the Wavefront OBJ writer.
Upgraded MFEM library version to 4.6.0.
The surface_normal expression now accepts mesh types other than polydata, allowing it to be used more easily as an operator-created variable.
Added more keywords (“MFA”, “2fa”, “Autentication”, and “OTP”) that cause VisIt clients to open a second popup for a password.
Updated the ADIOS2 library version to 2.10.0-rc1, allowing BP5 files to be read by VisIt.
Removed the dependency on C-Blosc1.
Added a new dependency on C-Blosc2.
VisIt’s Blueprint reader was enhanced so fields in Blueprint index files can supply a display_name hint that specifies the name used to expose the field in VisIt. This feature enables the index file to group related variables under sub-menus if the names in include slash characters.
VisIt’s Blueprint reader was enhanced so fields that are low-order but are associated with a high-order mesh can be refined when the mesh is refined, as when the user applies a MultiresControl operator. This enables VisIt to correctly view such fields.
VisIt’s CLI has a new GetLastMessage() function that returns the last message that VisIt issued, regardless of its type.
GetPlotInformation() can now contain entries for multiple-curves when Query-over-time is performed on multiple variables. For example, if a pick-through-time was performed for variables ‘u’ and ‘v’, the curve for ‘v’ would be retrieved via ‘GetPlotInformation()[‘Curves’][‘v’]. Single variable results will still be retrieved via ‘GetPlotInformation()[‘Curve’].
The ADIOS2 database plugin learned a new flavor of file type: Pixie3D.
A number of improvements were made to the UNV plugin including quadric elements, support for antique SDRC/I-Deas files prior to Master Series (versions 4,5 and 6), GMSH hidden polygon linear element.
The Docker files for Debian 10,11,12, Fedora 31, Ubuntu 18, 20,22 have all been updated for this release. All but Ubuntu 18 build Qt 6.
Updated LLNL host profiles for new systems
Ported VisIt to LANL’s Crossroads (XR) System
Refactored VisIt’s CMake Python logic to use pip instead of distutils.
Updated VisIt to use Python 3.9.

New in VisIt 3.4.0 Pre-release (Nov 23, 2023)

New in VisIt 3.3.3 (Apr 3, 2023)

Bugs fixed:
Fixed a bug reading Mili material variables when the mesh had multiple domains.
Fixed a bug causing the blueprint plugin to incorrectly assign a zonal association to mfem grid functions that were neither H1 nor L2.
Fixed a bug reading a “.visit” file with more than 10,000 files and comments for each file.
Fixed a bug that caused the compute engine to crash when in scalable rendering mode. The specific bug involved saving non screen capture images, but the crash could occur whenever doing scalable rendering.
Fixed a bug in the Mili reader where the Green Lagrange strain was using incorrect initial coordinates.
Fixed a bug preventing files with the extension “.h5m” from being grouped with smart grouping turned on.
Fixed a rare issue with the color table window that caused it to resize horizontally larger than the screen, causing buttons to be off the screen.
Fixed a bug with Pick where it incorrectly used the node origin.
Fixed a bug where “atan2” did not show up in the list of expressions in the Expressions window.
Fixed a bug with the Mili reader where variables that were only defined on a portion of the nodes weren’t being placed on the correct nodes.
Fixed the default attributes repr() behavior in the CLI to again print attribute details. This was unintended change introduced with Python 3 support.
VisIt’s internal ssh (qtssh) was updated with latest putty version (0.78) to fix client-server connection issues from Windows.
Enhancements:
Added a tutorial on Partitioning to the documentation.
In the X Ray Image Query, a warning was added for the BMP output type, saying it may not function properly. This output type will be removed in the next major release of VisIt.
For Blueprint output types from the X Ray Image Query, a host of new metadata has been added, as well as the imaging plane topologies.
In the X Ray Image Query, users may optionally pass energy group bounds to the query, which will appear as part of the metadata in the Blueprint output types.
In the X Ray Image Query, users may optionally pass the units for various input and output values through the query. These units will be propagated in the Blueprint output metadata.
Added support to export PolyData with a single cell type to the Blueprint writer.
The X Ray Image Query now outputs Blueprint meshes representing the rays used in the raytrace if the Blueprint output type is selected.
The Blueprint output from the X Ray Image Query previously included coordinates for the spatial extents of the output image. These coordinates have been promoted to a valid blueprint mesh.
Updated the Silo reader to support a rare decomposition format discovered in the wild.
Added support for reading Blueprint data with blueprint_index per-mesh partition maps to the Blueprint reader.
Extended support for reading sparsely populated Blueprint trees in the Blueprint reader.
Enhanced the make movie script so that it sets the number of digits in the output file names based on the number needed rather than always using four when the number of frames in the movie is known ahead of time, which is when a session file or the current plot is used. Note that it uses a minimum of four digits to maintain backwards compatibility and a maximum of seven digits on the assumption you will not create a movie longer than 92 hours.
Added initial support for reading Blueprint structured meshes with non-trivial strides to the Blueprint reader.
The X Ray Image Query Documentation has been expanded. It now has its own page, where all of the additions and features are extensively documented.
Made some usability enhancements to the color table window; specifically, changed which color tables appear by default and removed some color tables that are superfluous.

New in VisIt 3.3.2 (Feb 8, 2023)

Bugs fixed in version 3.3.2:
Fixed a bug on macOS that prevented VisIt from browsing files and folders in the Desktop, Documents, or Downloads folders when launched by double-clicking the icon, even when the user gave VisIt permission to do so.
Fixed a bug reading Mili material variables when the mesh had multiple domains.
Fixed a bug causing the blueprint plugin to incorrectly assign a zonal association to mfem grid functions that were neither H1 nor L2.
Fixed a bug reading a “.visit” file with more than 10,000 files and comments for each file.
Fixed a bug that caused the compute engine to crash when in scalable rendering mode. The specific bug involved saving non screen capture images, but the crash could occur whenever doing scalable rendering.
Fixed a bug in the Mili reader where the Green Lagrange strain was using incorrect initial coordinates.
Fixed a bug preventing files with the extension “.h5m” from being grouped with smart grouping turned on.
Fixed a rare issue with the color table window that caused it to resize horizontally larger than the screen, causing buttons to be off the screen.
Fixed a bug with Pick where it incorrectly used the node origin.
Fixed a bug where “atan2” did not show up in the list of expressions in the Expressions window.
Fixed a bug with the Mili reader where variables that were only defined on a portion of the nodes weren’t being placed on the correct nodes.
Fixed the default attributes repr() behavior in the CLI to again print attribute details. This was unintended change introduced with Python 3 support.
VisIt’s internal ssh (qtssh) was updated with latest putty version (0.78) to fix client-server connection issues from Windows.
Enhancements in version 3.3.2:
Added a tutorial on Partitioning to the documentation.
In the X Ray Image Query, a warning was added for the BMP output type, saying it may not function properly. This output type will be removed in the next major release of VisIt.
For Blueprint output types from the X Ray Image Query, a host of new metadata has been added, as well as the imaging plane topologies.
In the X Ray Image Query, users may optionally pass energy group bounds to the query, which will appear as part of the metadata in the Blueprint output types.
In the X Ray Image Query, users may optionally pass the units for various input and output values through the query. These units will be propagated in the Blueprint output metadata.
Added support to export PolyData with a single cell type to the Blueprint writer.
The X Ray Image Query now outputs Blueprint meshes representing the rays used in the raytrace if the Blueprint output type is selected.
The Blueprint output from the X Ray Image Query previously included coordinates for the spatial extents of the output image. These coordinates have been promoted to a valid blueprint mesh.
Updated the Silo reader to support a rare decomposition format discovered in the wild.
Added support for reading Blueprint data with blueprint_index per-mesh partition maps to the Blueprint reader.
Extended support for reading sparsely populated Blueprint trees in the Blueprint reader.
Enhanced the make movie script so that it sets the number of digits in the output file names based on the number needed rather than always using four when the number of frames in the movie is known ahead of time, which is when a session file or the current plot is used. Note that it uses a minimum of four digits to maintain backwards compatibility and a maximum of seven digits on the assumption you will not create a movie longer than 92 hours.
Added initial support for reading Blueprint structured meshes with non-trivial strides to the Blueprint reader.
The X Ray Image Query Documentation has been expanded. It now has its own page, where all of the additions and features are extensively documented.
Made some usability enhancements to the color table window; specifically, changed which color tables appear by default and removed some color tables that are superfluous.

New in VisIt 3.3.1 (Sep 30, 2022)

Fixed a bug with the color table window where the list of color tables could be populated even when no tags were selected.
Fixed a discrepancy with the x ray image query where, if Blueprint output was requested, the result message from the query would display differently than the other output types.
Fixed a bug with the color table window searching feature where the name text box could no longer be properly edited.
Fixed a rare bug in the color table where if tagging was enabled, certain tags were turned on, and searching was enabled, a crash could occur.
Fixed a bug with the x ray image query, where a crash would occur if the specified output directory was too long.
Fixed an issue with the Tag Bar in the Manager portion of the color table window that caused it to display incorrect information while using the search feature.
The color table buttons now correctly preserve their value if the selected table has been filtered out of the list of color tables.
Resolved a rare issue with the default color table buttons that caused them to occasionally select a different color table if tagging and searching were enabled at the same time.
Fixed a bug where the default continuous and default discrete color table buttons no longer reflected accurate information when large numbers of color tables were deleted.
Fixed a bug where if a user deleted the final continuous/discrete color table in a filtering selection, the default continuous/discrete button did not update to a fall-back color table.
Fixed an issue where the default continuous and discrete color table buttons had a different idea of what the default color tables were than other parts of VisIt.
Added a guard so that it is impossible to delete the last continuous or last discrete color table.
Fixed a bug where it was possible to select a color table that was not in the tag-filtered list of color tables.
Fixed a crash caused by deleting a color table that was not in the filtered list of color tables.
Fixed a crash caused by clicking the delete button when no more color tables were in the filtered list.
Fixed an issue with the x ray image query that caused rays to sometimes be cast incorrectly when specifying non-square output.
Added a patch for the Mili reader that increases the maximum path length for input files from 300 to 4096 characters.
The widget for displaying Blueprint export options was improved to use a fixed-width font and ensure newlines are preserved.
The Mili reader now correctly computes displacements from the initial coordinates (via mc_load_nodes() from the Mili A file). Previously, it was computing displacements relative to the nodal positions (nodpos variable) at the initial timestep.
Pick now correctly takes into account the node origin.

New in VisIt 3.3.0 (Jul 7, 2022)

General features added in version 3.3:
The handling of color tables has been enhanced and modified.
Many color tables from Fabio Crameri have been added for individuals who are color vision deficient (CVD).
To handle the expanded list of color tables a new tagging system has been introduced to allow users to reduce the color tables displayed in the color table controls in the rest of the GUI. All the tagging and filtering controls are located in the existing Color table window.
Every color table has one or more tags.
Color table filtering can be turned on or off.
When color table filtering is off all the color tables are displayed in the color table controls in the rest of the GUI.
When color table filtering is on only the color tables associated with the active flags are displayed.
The user can select if only the color tables that contain all the tags or any of the tags gets displayed.
The color table categories have been eliminated since that functionality is now redundant with the introduction of the more flexible tagging system.
Changed active to default for everything related to color tables, including the GUI and the Python scripting interface.
New capabilities have been added to allow repartitioning or flattening domain decomposed data when exporting to Blueprint.
When repartitioning data, the user can specify the number of domains to repartition the data into. The current repartitioning algoithm uses a simple spatial decomposition algorithm. The user can also specify a field to control the partitioning, enabling an arbitrary repartitioning.
When flattening the data, all the domains are merged into a single domain.
To export repartitioned data, go to the Blueprint export options, select the Partition operation and set the target number of domains field.
To export flattened data, go to the Blueprint export options, select Flatten_CSV to export the mesh data to vertex and element based CSV files, or Flatten_HDF5 to export the data to a Blueprint Table node.
It is also possible to directly access flattened data from the Python scripting interface. The Flatten function uses the new Flatten Query to return the active plot data as a tabular, numpy compatible, 2D array.
Support for SeedMe was removed since the service was retired.
References to old email lists (@ornl.gov) throughout the code and documentation were replaced with references to the help pages of the new website.
The behavior of Python’s help was modified to first present what help would normally produce followed by the output from apropos when that output is non-empty.
The French translation was updated thanks to @cessenat. We are still looking for volunteers for translations in other languages. If interested, please contact us.
A new (beta) Castilian Spanish translation was created thanks to @cessenat using auto-translation from English. It likely still requires review by someone who is fluent in Spanish and we would welcome any volunteers.
Added support and examples of 2D structured grids representing surfaces in 3 dimensions.
Advanced features added in version 3.3:
Text annotation macros (e.g. $time, $cycle, …) have been enhanced in some key ways. First, more macros are available including $index, $dbcomment, $numstates, etc.. Next, printf-style formatting can be specified for a macro and multiple instances of the same or different macros can appear in the same annotation object.
Attribute assignment (e.g. cylinderAtts.point1=... or cylinderAtts.SetPoint1(...)) operations in the Python scripting interface were modified to catch and disallow incorrect usage instead of silently falling back to default values. Better error checks and messages were also added. It is possible these changes may cause code that worked fine to now terminate with a Python exception. In such cases, the resulting error message should explain the cause of the failure and the changes required to fix it should be obvious and minimal.
A new function was added to the Python scripting interface named apropos(regex) similar in purpose to Unix’ apropos. It makes finding the names of functions and objects much easier. It will return a list of the names of functions or objects where the regular expression matches either in the method name or in the documentation string for the method or in a stringified instance (objects only). All matching is case insensitive.
ColorControlPointsList and GaussianControlPointsList now have a SetNum method for changing the size of the underlying controlPoints list. Control points will be added or removed based on the current size of the list. The SetNum method was also added to the script created by logging / command recording, so that the control points list has the correct size and the created script can execute correctly without crashing the Python scripting interface.
A section was added to the Developer Manual describing process launching.
A section was added to the Developer Manual describing building VisIt with spack.
A tutorial on Python expressions was added to the tutorials section of the manual.
Changes in GUI behavior for version 3.3:
In the file open window, next to Open file as type: when you click Guess from file name/extension, the list of file types is now sorted in alphabetical case-insensitive order. The same change has been made in the list of Databases in the Plugin Manager.
In the plugin selection in the file open window, users can now delete the text that is there and start typing the name of the plugin that they wish to open files with, and VisIt will autocomplete the entered text to select a plugin.
Custom titles for Legend annotation objects can now be set.
Dolly and FlyThrough navigation modes now support mouse-wheel interaction for zooming.
Changing the navigation mode (Trackball, Dolly, FlyThrough) will now trigger an automatic View reset.
File format reader changes in version 3.3:
The informational message displayed after successfully exporting a database now contains the host and path to the file.
The Chombo reader now supports anisotropic refinements.
The WData reader was added.
The Blueprint reader was enhanced to support the implicit points topology.
The Xmdv reader was enhanced to allow users the ability to specify the output precision when exporting data.
The Blueprint reader was enhanced to support polyhedral meshes. If you read a polyhedral mesh, it will automatically convert the mesh to a tetrahedral mesh, as well as convert the fields as needed. It will also keep track of original element ids so that you don’t see the new lines from the resulting tetrahedra.
The Xolotl reader was updated to support phase-space.
The SW4 reader was renamed as sw4img to fix static builds.
The NASTRAN reader was modified to reduce the amount of debug outputs and handle DOS line endings.
The Blueprint reader now supports the option to choose between two different MFEM low order refinement schemes. The Legacy option is the original LOR scheme used by VisIt, and the new option preserves the continuity of meshes. The new option is enabled by default.
VisIt-generated expressions are no longer included in VTK, Blueprint, and Silo exports.
The ADIOS and ADIOS2 readers were updated to build with c-blosc, so blosc-compressed ADIOS-based files can now be read by VisIt.
Changes to VisIt’s plots in version 3.3:
Pseudocolor Plot Limits now say Use Actual Data instead of Use Current Plot.
Changes to VisIt’s expression language in version 3.3:
Added the logical_nodeid, logical_zoneid, node_domain, zone_domain, and zone_centers mesh expressions.
Moved the divergence, curl, Laplacian, and gradient functions from the Miscellaneous submenu to the Vector submenu within the Insert function… menu in the Expressions window.
Added the new ghost_zoneid function to the Mesh submenu in the Expressions window.
Added the new crack_width function to the Misc submenu in the Expressions window.
Changes to VisIt’s picks and queries in version 3.3:
Upgraded the XRay Image Query so it can now output Blueprint files.
Upgraded the XRay Image Query so users can now specify an output directory for query results.
The Pick operation now has the option to include the Euclidean distance between the current and previous Pick in the GUI’s output window. To enable this option, check the Distance to previous box Pick output window. You should then see a new field in the tabular output display titled Distance to previous.
Other bugs fixed in version 3.3:
Fixed a bug with expression insert-function for constant expressions, so that the usage is clearer.
Fixed a bug with the PlainText reader, where leading and trailing whitespace was included int the variable names.
Fixed a bug with the time slider in the main window where it would resize to an extremely wide minimum width in some situations.
Fixed an issue where the list of plugins in the File open window could disappear when selecting plugins from the list multiple times.
Fixed a bug where changing the Number format for a Contour plot’s legend would have no affect on the labels next to the tick marks.
Fixed a bug that prevented users from comparing particular VisIt Python objects in the Python scripting interface with non-VisIt types.
Fixed a crash with Libsim when attempting to Export databases that have export options specified as enums.
Fixed a bug where right-clicking in the Viewer Window to access popup menu was preventing mouse-wheel navigation functionality until another mouse click was performed.
Fixed several bugs with Flythrough navigation mode: multiple calls to Reset View would make the plot disappear; adding new plots would make them disappear from view; issuing a Recenter View would move the camera inside the plot.
Fixed a bug where the bounding box extents would not be reset when Scale 3D Axes was turned off.
Fixed a crash in the Python scripting interface when DeleteAllPlots is called when there are no plots and a callback has been registered for SetActivePlots.
Fixed a bug in visit_composite where output formats like bmp, png could not be read back in by VisIt nor used to encode movies.
Fixed a bug with the Python scripting interface where the PySide2 module wouldn’t load when running one of the pre-built binaries.
The Contour plot’s fields were re-ordered internally to fix a bug where a command-recorded script of a Contour plot would crash the Python scripting interface if the number of contours had been increased from the default.
The images and wording for Curve Overlay and Reflected Curve Overlay templates in the Save Movie Wizard were updated to demonstrate that they can be used on 3D plots, not just 2D plots.
Configuration changes in version 3.3:
Added host profiles for the KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory.
Updated the Ohio Supercomputing Center host profiles.
Updated the ORNL host profiles to remove obsolete machines.
Renamed the mxterm launch profiles to sxterm in the LLNL host profiles since mxterm has been replaced with sxterm.”
Updated the TOSS3 installations at LLNL so that they would also run on TOSS4 systems.
Updated the LLNL host profiles for TOSS systems to use sbatch instead of msub when launching batch jobs.
Build features added in version 3.3:
Build_visit was modified to do an out-of-source build for Qt.
Enhanced build_visit to optionally build Qt 5.10.1 instead of Qt 5.14.2. To enable building Qt 5.10.1, add --qt510 to the command line.
Build_visit was enhanced to patch Xdmf so that it builds with gcc 11.2.
The --dry-run command line option was removed from build_visit.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.3:
VTK-m was updated to version 1.7.0 and VTK-h was updated to version 0.8.0.
Added the spack environment files compilers.yaml and packages.yaml for crusher.olcf.ornl.gov.
There is now a WIN32DEFINES xml tag for database plugins, used to specify preprocessor defines needed by a plugin on Windows. If the needed define comes from a thirdparty library, the Find module for that library should set a CMake var with those defines that the plugin could then use in the .xml file. See FindCGNS.cmake and CGNS.xml for an example.
The minimum required version of CMake is now 3.14.
The programs qtviswinExample, qtvtkExample, qvtkopenglExample were added to help with debugging OpenGL issues.
VisIt test data archive tooling was changed from 7z to tar with the same (lzma2) compression.
The version of Conduit was upgraded to 0.8.2.
VisIt now calculates the topological dimension of the data tree after the data was retrieved from the database, and after SIL and/or Material selection was applied. This should aid downstream filters that depend on an accurate topological dimension. For mixed-topology datasets the largest topological dimension is what gets reported. Filters that modify topological structure are still required to update the topological dimension.
The DEFINES, CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS tags in the xml files for plugins now support an optional components attribute specifying for which component(s) the tag applies. These are currently valid for the MDServer(“M”), serial Engine (“ESer”) and parallel Engine(“EPar”). Multiple components may be specified, separated by commas. See ADIOS2.xml or MOAB.xml for an example.
The DEFINES tag now supports surrounding definitions in quotes if the quotes are important to be carried through. They must be escaped with a ‘'. See uintah.xml for an example.
The version of MFEM was upgraded to 4.4.
Added the script run-build-visit for running build_visit to build the third party libraries on LLNL systems. The script has the following usage:
Usage: +”machine name” -v “version” -s “build_visit_script” Valid machine names: kickit_mesagl (B-Div, Linux, x86_64, mesagl), kickit_opengl (B-Div, Linux, x86_64, opengl), quartz (LC, Linux, x86_64), lassen (LC, Linux, power9), rztrona (LC, Linux, x86_64), rzansel (LC, Linux, power9), jade (LC, Linux, x86_64), sierra (LC, Linux, power9)
Fixed a bug with the regression test suite where the image difference metrics were reported incorrectly in the HTML and JSON output.
Added TestAutoName() method for automagically naming test baseline files.
The signature for the SET_UP_THIRD_PARTY function for Find modules was modified to utilize keyword arguments:
LIBS (required) – the list of libraries to be found
LIBDIR (optional) – use when libs are located in an extension other than lib64 or lib
INCDIR (optional) – use when the headers are located in an extension other than include
The first argument still must be the name of the package.
The packaging was enhanced to add the libicui18n, libicudata and libicuuc system libraries used by Qt to the lib directory. This is done automaticallly if the libraries can be found in the lib64 directory. The packaging logic was also enhanced to add the libstdc++ libraries to the lib directory of a distribution. The libstdc++ library depends on VISIT_CXX_LIBRARY being defined. This would typically be added to the config site file and would be set if using a non-standard compiler on a system. Both of these enhancements only apply to Linux systems.
The version of Mili was upgraded to 22.1.
VisIt now builds successfully with ADIOS enabled while MPI is disabled.

New in VisIt 3.2.2 (Feb 2, 2022)

Bugs fixed in version 3.2.2:
Fixed a bug in the Blueprint reader preventing unsigned 64-bit array field values.
Fixed a bug in the Blueprint reader that caused unnecessary copies of topology connectivity arrays.
Fixed a bug in the Blueprint reader where YAML or JSON root files were rewritten on open, which could strip comments and change the file entires. The root file is now opened in a read only mode.
Fixed a bug where versions of VisIt that supported hardware accelerated rendering would display a black image in the visualization window.
Fixed a crash when saving images greater than approximately 8,000 x 8,000. Now images can be saved up to 16,384 x 16,384.
Fixed a bug in the Chombo Users configuration that prevented the macros from being loaded and appearing in the Macros window.
Fixed a bug where VisIt would hang when connecting to a remote system running Linux when connecting from a Linux or macOS system.
The path is now stripped off the filename in the Pick output to be consistent with output on linux.
The command recording for GlobalLineoutAttributes now works correctly.
Fixed a bug with Pick for Rectilinear grids when real zones are completely surrounded by ghost zones.
Fixed a bug where VisIt would hang when working with a AMR meshes and the number of active patches was less than the number of processors and the patches were not rectilinear.
Fixed a bug where encoding an mpeg movie on an Ubuntu 21 system failed.
Fixed a bug in the Uintah reader where long64 data was read as zeroes. This primarily impacted particle ids.
Enhancements in version 3.2.2:
The VTK reader has been expanded to support .pvd files.
A -lang command-line argument was added to start VisIt with a different language translation. For example, use -lang fr to run VisIt with the French translation.
Updated the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Trinity host profile to no longer use the gateway.
Improved the setting of the tick marks and labels for log scaled axes for curve plots.
Python endpoint scripts (such as pip, pyenv) are now installed along with Python inside of VisIt on linux and macOS.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.2.2:
Fixed a compile issue on a Fedora 31 Docker container that didn’t have any OpenGL header files installed. This involved modifying engine/main/CMakeLists.txt to add OPENGL_INCLUDE_DIR to the include directories if building with IceT and MesaGL.
Enhanced build_visit to apply a patch to fix a compile issue with VTK with gcc 10.3 on Ubuntu 21.04.
Added a Docker file for Ubuntu 21.04.
Fixed a bug where the test suite files displayed in the dashboard produced by the regression test suite were blank.
Enhanced build_visit to apply a patch to fix a compile issue with p7zip with gcc 10.3 on Ubuntu 21.04.
Enhanced build_visit so that it worked on systems that only have Python 3 installed.
Enhanced build_visit to apply a patch that fixes a compile issue with Python on MacOS 11.
Enhanced the building of Qt in build_visit to check for the system libraries being located in /usr/lib if /usr/lib64 doesn’t exist.
Enhanced build_visit to apply a patch that fixes a compile issue with Qt with gcc-11.
Added a Docker file for Debian 11.
Added the spack environment files compilers.yaml and packages.yaml for spock.olcf.ornl.gov.

New in VisIt 3.2.1 (Jul 20, 2021)

Bugs fixed in version 3.2.1:
Fixed a bug that resulted in incorrect plots of mesh_quality/min_side_volume and mesh_quality/max_side_volume.
Fixed a few issues running build_visit with --static.
Fixed a bug with the CreateBonds operator window displaying %.1 in Bonds list Max field instead of correct value.
Fixed a bug where the splash screen in some binary distributions would display “Unknown” for the git version instead of the actual git version.
Fixed a bug with the Xdmf Reader not reading TIME_LIST for temporal data collections.
Fixed a bug with the Mili reader where some of the material colors in a filled boundary plot would be black. The Mili reader would assign random colors to materials when no material colors were specified in the file, which resulted in some materials being black. Now the reader doesn’t specify any colors in that case so that the material colors are chosen using the filled boundary plot’s default color selection algorithm.
Fixed a bug with the DataBinning operator window where the Dimension 2 variable would be disabled for 3D.
Fixed a bug with ghost zone generation that caused VisIt to not display any data when displaying data from a parallel Exodus file when subsetting based on ElementBlock.
Fixed a bug with full frame mode that resulted in the labels from the label plot not being drawn correctly.
Fixed a bug launching the CLI when specifying -v 3.2 when the default version in that installation was still an older version of VisIt (e.g. 3.1.4).
Fixed a crash with the Molecule plot when drawn with Sphere Imposters for atoms and either the ‘scaleRadiusBy’ or ‘radiusScaleFactor’ options are changed.
Fixed a bug in the Molecule plot where created bonds colored by atom were being colored incorrectly.
Fixed a crash in the CLI when attempting to ‘print’ a legend annotation object.
Fixed a bug with the Legend annotation object window where the Values column in the Values/Labels table in the Tick marks tab wasn’t being prefilled.
Fixed a bug for Windows where importing VisIt into python failed due to an inability to retrieve necessary enviroment variable information.
Fixed a bug that resulted in the rubber band zoom box being rendered incorrectly on Mac retina displays.
Fixed a bug for Windows where exporting a multi-block Silo file into a non-default directory would make the file unreadable by VisIt.
Enhancements in version 3.2.1:
Added a section on developing at GitHub to the developers manual.
Datasets that contain AMR meshes are now treated as time varying by default. This will guard against issues that arise with time varying AMR meshes that aren’t explicitly tagged as time varying within the datasets.
Added support for reading Rind values for structured grids from CGNS files to provide ghost zone information. To enable the reading of Rind values you must set the environment variable CGNS_USE_RIND (i.e. “setenv CGNS_USE_RIND”).
When exporting a database on a remote machine, the window will now display the host name next to the Directory name text field.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.2.1:
When viewing test results in a web browser, the text tests will now correctly display leading spaces.
The build_visit python module was changed so that when --system-python or --alt-python3-dir is specified, python3 is searched for first.
Removed tcmalloc from VisIt.
Fixed problems building Mesa and VTK (with python wrappers) with gcc 10.
Fixed a bug in build_visit where specifying --no-sphinx resulted in the failure of being able to build VisIt.
Fixed a bug in build_visit that caused it to improperly set the architecture directory name when using gcc 10.2. For example, on a linux system with an x86_64 processor, it previously set it to linux-x86_64_gcc instead of the correct linux-x86_64_gcc-10.2.
Fixed a bug in build_visit that prevented CGNS from building on Linux systems.


New in VisIt 3.2.0 (Apr 22, 2021)

General features added in version 3.2:
Updated VisIt to use Python 3.
Added the command line option -py2to3 to the CLI, which enables limited on-the-fly Python 2 to Python 3 conversion for scripts passed via -s or visit.Source(). See VisIt’s CLI manual for more details.
Upgraded VTKm to a recent version. Support was added for zone centered variables and 3D unstructured meshes with tetrahedra, pyramid and prism cells, in addition to the existing support for hexahedra.
PySide has been re-enabled using a version matching Qt-5.14.2.
The Windows package has been digitally signed, and should prevent or reduce Windows Defender and antivirus blocking/warnings.
Advanced features added in version 3.2:
The -disable-ghosts-for-t-intersections flag has been reverted back to -enable-ghosts-for-t-intersections, and the creation of ghosts for t-intersections will now be off by default. This will improve performance for the default situation where ghost t-intersections are not needed or desired.
Changes in GUI behavior for version 3.2:
Fixed a bug in the GUI windows where changes sometimes would not take effect when the Apply button was clicked.
File format reader changes in version 3.2:
A reader was added to support AVS ucd file format.
A reader was added to support the FMS file format.
Enhanced the MFEM reader so that it provides the original cell numbers that allow VisIt to successfully eliminate mesh lines that were not part of the original high order mesh.
Enabled the Rect reader as an optional reader on Windows.
Enabled the ZipWrapper reader on Windows.
Upgraded the CGNS library used by the CGNS reader from 3.2.1 to 4.1.2. The new CGNS library includes a fix for the handling of RIND zones in structured grids, so the results may change when viewing that type of data.
Enhanced the Conduit Blueprint reader to support material volume fractions and mixed-variable fields using Blueprint Matsets.
Enhanced the Conduit Blueprint reader to support datasets written to YAML root and data files.
Enhanced the boxlib reader to always return double precision data.
Enhanced the PlainText reader to return double precision data.
Enhanced the UNV reader to read gmsh legacy files (thanks Olivier Cessenat).
Fixed a bug with the Tecplot reader for handling cell-centered data (Thank you Phil Chiu!).
Fixed a bug with the Boxlib reader reading double precision data.
Fixed a bug with the Silo reader that resulted in VisIt crashing whenever negative material numbers were encountered. VisIt will now display an error message noting that negative material numbers are not supported.
Fixed a bug in the Stimulate Image reader (file extensions spr, sdt), where a negative pixel delta in the metadata resulted in incorrect pick results, incorrect sampled lineouts and potentially other erroneous behavior.
Enhanced the Xolotl reader to support the ability to visualize super clusters.
Enhanced the CGNS reader to support reading arbitrary polygons and polyhedra.
Fixed a bug with the BoxLib reader causing VisIt to crash when opening files on OSX.
Enhanced the Mili reader to support setting the global integration point for element sets. This can be accomplished by changing the default open options for Mili within the Plugin Manager. Available options are “Inner”, “Middle”, and “Outer”.
Enhanced the Mili reader to derive variables from stress and strain. If strain does not exist in the dataset, the plugin will derive four different versions of strain from the mesh.
Changes to VisIt’s plots in version 3.2:
Fixed a bug in the Histogram Plot where Use Current Plot will now use the actual data extents.
Changes to VisIt’s operators in version 3.2:
The Stagger operator is no longer enabled by default.
Enhanced the Clip operator to support “Crinkle” clipping, which retains whole cells that intersect with the clip boundary.
Threshold operations can now use the VTKm backend for structured meshes.
Updated the documentation for the Smooth Operator.
Other bugs fixed in version 3.2:
The checkbox in the Expression window that turns on the display of expressions from the database now indicates that it displays expressions from the database and auto generated ones.
Fixed an issue preventing build_visit from being able to build IceT.
When using the resample operator in VisIt’s python interface, useExtents will now take precedence over setting the resample dimensions explicitly, which matches the behavior in the GUI.
Fixed a bug with DataBinning (and DDFs) where it did not exclude Ghost Zones when binning.
Fixed a bug preventing the Min/Max expressions from working with domain decomposed datasets.
Fixed a bug that caused some LibSim examples to crash.
Configuration changes in version 3.2:
Added host profiles for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Ruby system. Removed the host profiles for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Zin system.
Added a host profile for the pdebug queue for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Magma system.
Updated the job launching on Trinity so that the VisIt CLI could be launched from a batch job without having to load the module of the compiler used to build VisIt.
Updated the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s host profiles to only include current machines.
Build features added in version 3.2:
For build_visit, there is now only one way to specify a debug build: –build-mode “Debug”. The –debug flag was removed. The default build-mode is “Release”. If “Debug” is specified, all third-party libraries are built in debug mode. If the intention is only to build VisIt in debug mode, it should be compiled separately after all the third-party libraries are compiled, passing -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Debug to cmake when configuring VisIt.
Removed FastBit and FastQuery from VisIt.
Fixed a bug with build_visit building IceT with MPICH.
Fixed a bug with build_visit building IceT on a system without OpenGL installed.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.2:
Added support for link checking in Sphinx documentation.
Added the ability to pass diff tolerances in Test()/TestText() testing methods in the test suite.
Updated the developer documentation on fuzzy matching and thresholds for testing.
Added support for pdb as a mode string for testing.
Removed the emptydomain cases from skip list for the test suite.
Added new assertion tests to ensure tests are running in the mode specified by the -m/–mode= command-line argument.
Updated the version of Qt to 5.14.2.
Replaced AssertXXXX() style test checks with TestValueXX, which supports more features, in the test suite.
Enhanced build_visit so that the version on the develop branch will now look for tar files in the github master branch of visit-dav/thirdparty if all other avenues fail.
Updated the version of LLVM version to 6.0.1 and added libclang to the build.
Updated the version of Mesa/OSMesa to 17.3.9.
Updated masonry to use Python 3.
Fixed textual differencing in regression testing for Windows OS.
Created a NotarizeAction in the masonry scripts so that notarization can be executed in the correct order with the rest of the actions.

New in VisIt 3.1.4 (Nov 24, 2020)

Bugs fixed in version 3.1.4:
Fixed a bug that resulted in domain boundaries being visible when using the OSPRay volume renderer.
Fixed the display of -help text on Windows.
Fixed a bug that caused incorrect opacity attenuation when ray casting datasets within very large or very small ranges.
Fixed a bug with the Hohlraum Flux query, where a ray would not be traced properly resulting in a compute engine crash. Those cases are now detected and the ray is ignored. Since this happens in extremely rare situations, this does not have a significant effect on the result.
Fixed a bug that prevented Pick over time from working with expressions that relied on mesh information.
Fixed a bug with the launcher script where the bank was not passed when launching with srun.
Modified the startup script to remove the code that unsetenv LD_PRELOAD since it was causing VisIt to fail at sites that were using LD_PRELOAD for VisIt to work properly. If you need to unsetenv LD_PRELOAD, it should be done in the custom launcher script, an example of which can be found in the LLNL customlauncher.
Fixed a bug with conn_cmfe expressions mapping between point meshes and polyhedral meshes that caused plotting failures with point data from files generated by Spheral. In particular, creating a Vector plot of "POINTS/velocity" failed. Creating a Pseudocolor plot of a point variable when scaling the points by another variable also failed, such as when displaying "POINTS/mass_density" and scaling the points by "POINTS/hmin".
Fixed a bug where applying Log scaling to the view of a Curve plot (or lineout curve) yielded wrong results.
Fixed a bug with the variable menu not being sorted properly when the variable list had mixed-case names and variable grouping was used.
Fixed a bug with the conn_cmfe expression where mapping a variable from a polyhedral mesh to a point mesh failed when the mesh was material selected.
Fixed bug (5067) causing Curve plots with the "Curve color" set to "Cycle" to change their color as the timestep is advanced and a similar issue with the Mesh plot when the "Mesh color" or "Opaque color" is set to "Random".
Fixed a bug that prevented the default volume renderer from correctly applying opacity attenuation to datasets that exist in extreme extent ranges.
Fixed a bug that prevented Pick over time from working correctly when running VisIt in parallel.
Fixed a bug with specifying -cli and -o "somefile* database",FORMAT from the command line.
Fixed a bug with the calculating of the data extents after calculating an expression that could result in the minimum being incorrectly set to zero when the minumum was greater than zero and the data was material selected.
Removed the misleading "Interrupt" button from the Compute Engine window.
Fixed a bug that prevented the GUI orientation from resetting back to vertical when changing from a custom appearance to the default appearance.
Enhancements in version 3.1.4:
Enabled the paraDIS and paraDIS_tecplot readers on Windows.
It is now possible to easily run VisIt in parallel with all the Linux distributions. To run in parallel, simply pass the number of processors to use with the "-np" command line option. For example, "visit -np 4" to run on 4 processors.
Removed the host profiles for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Max, Sequoia and Shark systems.
Enhanced the PLOT3D reader so that it can now process iblanking data. Users can specify if there is iblanking data in the file and whether or not to process it.
Added documentation for the "XRay Image" query to the Query section of the Quantitative Analysis chapter in the GUI Manual.
Updated the host profiles for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Tron, Zin and Zindev systems to use SSH tunneling.
Enhanced the Pick over time so that it uses a much faster route when picking verdict metric variables.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.1.4:
Updated build_visit for macOS 10.15.
Removed FastBit and FastQuery from VisIt.
Added notarization capability to the masonry macOS build scripts.
Updated a version comparison function in build_visit so that it worked on Manjaro Linux, an Arch Linux derivative.

New in VisIt 3.1.3 (Oct 1, 2020)

Bugs fixed in version 3.1.3:
Fixed a bug preventing SaveWindow from saving OSPRay rendered images.
Fixed a bug with the Pixie reader when it read 3D curvilinear meshes in parallel.
Fixed a bug where the parallel engine crashed when creating ghost zones from global ids.
Fixed a bug with the progress dialog staying visible when a client connection fails.
Added a menu indicator icon to the Color Table buttons so that it is more obvious that the button can be pushed to see available options.
Fixed a bug preventing the user from being able to performa a Pick Through Time using mesh quality metrics.
Fixed a couple of bugs with the MutilCurve plot. Fixed a bug where portions of the axes were missing or incomplete after switching the orientation. Fixed a bug where there were no tickmarks when displaying 16 curves.
Fixed a bug in the ColorTable window that limited the number of color control points to 200.
Added Philip Blakely's code to fix the memory leak in the Lines Database.
Fixed a bug in the ColorTable window that prevented colors on 'equal' control points from being changed.
Modified the GUI so that duplicate expressions are now handled gracefully with an automatic name change.
Fixed a bug preventing VisIt from correctly reading some types of files on Ubuntu when using non-English language settings.
Adding and deleting expressions in the expressions window now only takes effect when actually clicking the apply button.
Fixed a bug with the CGNS reader that caused VisIt to crash when doing a Subset plot of "zones" when reading data decomposed across multiple CGNS files.
Fixed a bug preventing some multi-processor mili datasets from being properly read.
Fixed a bug preventing database readers from being able to plot variables of the form "variable_name(subname)".
Fixed a bug that caused the Mili database reader to add duplicate materials.
Fixed a bug which caused external surfaces to be lost in the pseudocolor plot when using a gradient expression on a Curvilinear mesh (Structured Grid).
Changed the vertical scroll bar mode for the plot list to ScrollPerPixel and to use a single step so that the bottom of the plot list is not cutoff.
Fixed a bug preventing VisIt from displaying the manuals when using an out-of-source build.
Fixed a bug where the Plots Add menu would become disabled after drawing plots via the CLI, then calling OpenGUI() and deleting a plot.
Enhancements in version 3.1.3:
Increased the number of curves allowed by the MultiCurve plot from 16 to 20.
The Revolve operator was enhanced to be capable of revolving points/particles.
The Mili library was updated to version 19.2.
The Lineout operator documentation was improved in the GUI manual to describe in detail how the sampling and interpolation is performed.
Added the ability to generate ghost nodes for datasets that consist of collections of structured grids by matching the coordinates of the nodes on the exterior of individual structured grids. The coordinates must match exactly for them to be matched. Ghost nodes allow internal faces to be eliminated from Mesh, Filled Boundary, Pseudocolor and Subset plots. This improves rendering performance by reducing the amount of geometry to render. It also improves image quality for images rendered with transparency since it eliminates geometry that you are most likely not interested in seeing.
Updated the host profiles for the Sandia National Laboratories computer systems, adding host profiles for new systems and removing ones for obsolete systems.
Added support for the FILETYPE keyword to the Tecplot reader. The FULL type is the only type supported. If the FILETYPE keyword is specified and the type isn't FULL, an error is generated.
Modified the startup script to unsetenv LD_PRELOAD to protect against users setting it for the GL library, which would break rendering.
The Mili database reader was enhanced to create node displacements as derived variables when needed.
Added the SW4 reader and deleted the WPPImage reader.
Added the Tessellate operator, which tessellates high order elements into linear elements. The following high order cell types are supported: QUADRATIC_EDGE, CUBIC_LINE, LAGRANGE_TRIANGLE, QUADRATIC_TRIANGLE, BIQUADRATIC_TRIANGLE, LAGRANGE_QUADRILATERAL, BIQUADRATIC_QUAD, QUADRATIC_QUAD, LAGRANGE_TETRAHEDRON, QUATRADIC_TETRA, LAGRANGE_HEXAHEDRON and QUADRATIC_HEXAHEDRON. All unsupported types will be removed from the mesh.
Added parallel support for Remap operator.
Added host profiles for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Tron system. Removed the host profiles for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Cmax system.
Enhanced the VisIt Help menu such that the VisIt Manuals are opened in the user's default web browser instead of being rendered in the GUI window.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.1.3:
The build_visit script was enhanced to allow VisIt to build on Ubuntu 20.
The build_visit script was enhanced to allow VisIt to build on Redhat Enterprise Linux 8.
The build_visit script was enhanced to allow VisIt to build on Fedora Core 31

New in VisIt 3.1.2 (May 21, 2020)

Bugs fixed:
Fixed a bug with the xml tools where they would fail when the full version was specified (eg xml2cmake -v 3.1.2).
Fixed a bug printing to printers or PDF files on Windows.
Fixed a bug where the pick operator would choose ghost zones while picking from mili datasets.
Fixed several bugs with the Blueprint reader for cases where domain data also exists in the root file.
Fixed the ability to save a movie template via the Save Movie Wizard on Windows.
Fixed several bugs with the avtLinesFileFormat reader. The reader now distinguishes between 2D from 3D and will not remove identical consecutive points that exist on different lines.
Fixed a crash with the generation of ghost zones using global node ids where there were NULL domains.
Fixed a bug that caused trilinear ray casting to have very harsh lighting.
Fixed a bug with importing remote hosts.
Fixed a bug that was preventing VisIt from correctly generating normals for triangle strips.
Fixed a bug reading files generated with newer Exodus libraries.
Fixed a bug preventing full removal of the axes when using OSPRay rendering.
Fixed a bug where 2D axes annotation font settings weren't always saved to config files.
Fixed a bug where lines starting with !TIME and !ENSEMBLE ".visit" files weren't being processed properly and were interpreted as file names.
Fixed a bug that was producing bad volumes on datasets with cells of multiple dimensions.
Reduced the amount of '.' characters written to log files while waiting for processes to connect.
Fixed a crash when performing a choose center operation when there weren't any non-hidden active plots while in scalable rendering mode. It now prints an error message requesting that the user select a non-hidden plot.
Forced VisIt to always use Light Mode on macOS until Dark Mode is supported for Qt.
Fixed a bug where the OpenPMD reader might cause opening an HDF5 file to hang.
Enhancements:
Removed the pbatch launch profile from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Max host profile.
Added host profiles for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Magma and Boraxo systems.
Enhanced the CGNS reader to support a mesh decomposed across multiple CGNS files, one block per file as might be typical of file-per-processor parallel I/O. This requires that each file contain just a single CGNS mesh block. In addition, if all files do not also contain the same number of time steps, results will be indeterminate. The collection of CGNS files can be grouped together into a .visit file or follow the naming convention "basename.cgns.nblocks.iblock", where basename is any string, cgns is the string "cgns", nblocks is the number of blocks, and iblock is the block index.
Enhanced the VTK reader to support reading and writing VisIt expressions as non-specific FIELD variable named "VisItExpressions" of type string. To see an example, look at the example file named higher_order_triangles.vtk in vtk_test_data.7z
Enhanced the Pick Through Time to use a substantially faster algorithm by default. This algorithm will be enabled when preserving the picked element id. When preserving the picked coordinate, the original algorithm will be used instead.
Enhanced the new default Pick Through Time algorithm to handle vectors, tensors, and arrays. For vectors, the magnitude is used. For tensors and arrays, the major eigenvalue is used.
Enhanced the Expression window so that expressions in the expression list will appear alphabetically.
Enhanced the Blueprint reader to support expressions.
Enhanced the Blueprint reader to support Ascent outputs with multiple domains per file.
Changed the variable name Patch/Rank to Patch/ProcId in the Uintah reader.
Changes for VisIt developers:
The build_visit script was enhanced to allow VisIt to build on Ubuntu 19.10 systems using gcc 9.2.
The build_visit script was enhanced to allow VisIt to build on Debian 10.
Documentation changes:
Added sphinx docs on Visit's Integral Curve System.
Added sphinx docs for building VisIt on macOS using masonry.

New in VisIt 3.1.1 (Feb 22, 2020)

Bugs fixed:
Corrected a bug where certain types of mili datasets would cause unexpected crashes.
Corrected a bug where the Data level comparison wizard would always enter zero for the simulation cycle.
Corrected a bug where zone pick highlights were incorrect after transforms were applied.
Corrected a bug summing mesh_quality/volume in a sub-material setting.
Corrected a bug where VisIt crashes on start-up on some Windows systems when the system OpenGL version is too old. VisIt now determines the OpenGL version during the installation process and uses Mesa3D as a drop-in replacement if needed, with a warning on the installer pages to notify the user that the graphics cards / drivers should be updated.
Corrected a bug importing remote profiles from a Windows system.
Corrected a bug performing QueryOverTime with plots involving operator-created expressions.
Corrected a bug where VisIt would only display a black window when displaying on a Windows system running the XWin-32 X Server.
Corrected a bug with external surfaces not display with Pseudocolor Plots when the centering is changed from original centering.
Corrected a bug where makemili_driver was not properly installed, making it unusable.
Enhancements in version:
Updated the mfem library to version 4.0.
Added host profiles for Leibniz Supercomputing Centre.
Enhanced the FFP database plugin and enhanced to use libstripack when it is available, either installed in VisIt's lib dir or the path specified via the VISIT_FFP_STRIPACK_PATH environment variable.
Removed the host profile for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's rzuseq system. Removed the use of the rzgw gateway from all the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's RZ host profiles.
Changes:
Updated build_visit to work on macOS 10.14.
Enhanced build_visit to download the visit source code and third party libraries from GitHub instead of NERSC."
Updated build_visit to allow the user to disable the building of Sphinx. To disable building Sphinx specify "--no-sphinx".
Enhanced build_visit to also package VisIt into a tar file after building it so that VisIt is ready to install.
Enhanced build_visit to also build the VisIt manuals when building VisIt.
Enhanced build_visit to add checksums for the VisIt source tar file when writing a unified file. It assumes that the tar file containing the VisIt source file is in the current directory. If any errors are encountered and it can't add the checksums a warning is printed.

New in VisIt 3.1.0 (Jan 8, 2020)

General features added in version 3.1:
Added binary distributions for CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 19.
Changes in GUI behavior in version 3.1
Modified the VCR play/reverse play buttons so that they are now inactive when there are no active drawn plots.
Restructured several windows to reduce their height and allow for better usage on laptops. These include the Pick, Preference, Host profiles configuration setup, Poincare operator, LCS operator, Limit Cycle operator and Integral Curve operator windows.
Modified the help menu to refer to the VisIt Sphinx manual.
Changes in CLI behavior in version 3.1:
Added error checking of the arguments to View3DAttributes.RotateAxis().
File format reader changes in version 3.1:
Corrected a bug with the VTK reader parsing .vtm files when the 'DataSet' tag doesn't have a 'file' attribute.
Added the OpenPMD reader to VisIt. OpenPMD files are automatically recognized when they have the "pmd" or "opmd" extensions.
Updated the ADIOS2 reader to use ADIOS2 2.5.
Improved and corrected the handling of 2/3D tensor and symmetric tensor data in the Silo reader.
Changes to VisIt's plots in version 3.1:
Enhanced the Pseudocolor plot so that it can now render lines as tubes and ribbons and points as glyphs in mixed-topology unstructured grids and poly data.
Enhanced the Pseudocolor plot so that it can now glyph points when Draw objects as is set to Points.
Changes to VisIt's expression language in version 3.1:
Added the divide expression to allow users to specify a divide by zero value and a tolerance for zero.
Enhanced the min and max expressssions to support more than two input variables.
Changes to VisIt's picks and queries in version 3.1:
Corrected a bug where sometimes it wasn't possible to pick on a glyphed point lying near the dataset bounds.
Other bugs fixed in version 3.1:
Changing the opacity for a Pseudocolor plot no longer affects the glyph type of glyphed points.
Corrected an issue with installing host profiles after deleting or moving the .visit folder while VisIt is running.
Removed the visual artifacts of the Expressions window that were present when the window was first rendered.
Corrected a memory leak with Pseudocolor plots.
Corrected a bug with MPEG movies being generated upside down with incorrect colors.
Corrected a memory leak associated with reading ghost cells and nodes in the LibSim reader.
Corrected a bug with the Pick 'output object' output for tensor variables.
Corrected a bug with Pick where array variables were sometimes erroneously treated as vectors or tensors.
Build changes in version 3.1:
Enhanced build_visit to enable OpenSSL by default since Python depends on OpenSSL and Python is enabled by default.
Corrected a bug in build_visit that prevented OSMesa and MesaGL from building from within a Git checkout.
Added a patch to build_visit so that Qt builds on CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 19.
Modified build_visit so that it would build Adios2 on Mac OS X.
Modified build_visit to correct a compile error with LLVM compiling with icc 19.0.4.
Modified build_visit to include Python3 and Sphinx-2.2.1.
Modified build_visit so that Conduit would properly pick up the Fortran compiler.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.1:
Suppressed the Qt warning 'Empty filename passed to function'. Also added additional context information to the Qt log message if available.
Corrected compile errors when using Open MPI 1.6.5.
Re-factored sections of the Silo reader for recognizing variable types in metadata to a single function.
Corrected problems compiling Adios2 on Mac OS X 10.13.6
Changes to VisIt documentation in version 3.1:
Tensor expression functions have been fully documented.
Documentation now supports collapsible sections. For examples, see sections to show/hide code in the documentation of tensor expression functions.
Corrected compile issues with some of the Fortran LibSim examples.

New in VisIt 3.0.2 (Sep 20, 2019)

Bugs fixed:
Corrected a bug where VisIt would crash when attempting to use python expressions with other expressions as inputs.
Corrected a launch failure on Windows when 8dot3name (shortnames) is disabled on the system.
Corrected a bug with the mili plugin not handling integers in scientific notation.
Corrected a bug with the Uintah reader not being able to read index.xml files.
Corrected a bug with importing remote profiles, where it looked at the old Subversion repository for remote profiles. Now it looks at the new Git repository.
Corrected a bug where bringing up the Elevate attributes window would crash the graphical user interface on OSX.
Corrected a bug with the Uintah reader where it would not load because the libxml2 could not be found.
Corrected a bug where the GUI plot list goes blank on macOS.
Corrected a bug where the VTK reader incorrectly set topological dimension of a dataset to 0, making the dataset undrawable by VisIt. This occured in a multiblock case where the first block contained neither points nor cells.
Corrected a bug with highlighting zones picked by their global ids. The highlighted cells were incorrect or non-existent before.
Corrected a bug where the OriginalZoneLabels and OriginalNodeLabels variables appeared twice in the menu for Mili files.
Corrected a viewer crash when glyphed points were scaled by a tensor.
Enhancements:
Host profiles were added for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Summit system.
Tables in the graphical user interface documentation that ran off the edge of the page have been converted to definition lists.
Modified the batch launching at NERSC to work on Cori after the major operating system upgrade."
Openssl was added to the list of required libraries in build_visit.
Added the turbo color table.
The XYZ writer replaces '?' with UNKNOWN_ATOMIC_ELEMENT and now warns the user if the dataset is not effectively point-centered.
The Xdmf reader now supports time-varying grid counts via a top-level <Information Name="TimeVaryingMetaData" Value="True"/> node in the Xdmf file.
Added a reader for Xolotl files. Xolotl is an open-source, high performance plasma-surface interactions simulator that is under development with the DOE's SciDAC program. VisIt will automatically recognize files that end with the extention ".xolotl" as Xolotl files.
Binary distributions have been added for Ubuntu 16, Ubuntu 18, Debian 9, and Fedora 27.
Support for reading Uintah files has been added to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Ubunutu 16, Ubuntu 18, Debian 9 and Fedora 27 binary distributions.
Changes for VisIt developers:
Updated masonry to build adios2 for OSX.
Corrected the building of plugins against a VisIt install for OSX.
Corrected an xmledit failure due to missing a Qt cocoa plugin.
PySide was removed from build_visit until we get a newer version working with VisIt.
Corrected a bug with build_visit that prevented Uintah from being built with MPICH on Linux. This occured when specifying "--mpich --uintah" on the command line.

New in VisIt 3.0.1 (Jul 13, 2019)

Bugs fixed in version 3.0.1:
Corrected a bug where VisIt would crash rendering transparent geometry when processor 0 didn't have any geometry.
Corrected a bug where VisIt would not switch into scalable rendering mode when it should have when the total number of primitives to render was greater than 2 billion. This typically resulted in VisIt crashing because it ran out of memory.
Corrected the batch launching on Sierra type systems at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Corrected a bug where glyphed points color were rendered in the wrong color when transparency was turned on.
Corrected a bug with the Expressions window where the 'Type' indicator in the variable definition would become blank when 'Apply' was clicked.
Corrected the inability to change the opacity attenuation when using ray casting in the Volume plot.
Updated the language translations in the graphical user interface.
Added support for cell-centered data with the Pseudocololor plot's line geometry options (tube, ribbon, endpoints).
Corrected a bug where the tool bar would be rendered with nonsense imagery when an image was zoomed for the first time in Zoom mode.
Enhancements in version 3.0.1:
Rewrote the Mili database reader. Among other things, the plugin now supports a Griz-like menu, material variables, global variables, shared variables, and integration points. At the moment, only the mid integration point is available for visualization and is selected by default. Future updates will allow the user to change which integration point is used. Also, the old .mili file format is no longer valid. You can create new .mili files by using the updated makemili tool, located in visit/bin.
Added database readers for ADIOS2 version 2.4.0.
Changed the default for the color table in the Pseudocolor and Surface plots from 'hot' to 'Default' making those plots use the default color map by default.
Switched to case-insensitive variable name sorting in the graphical user interface.
Enhanced the default volume renderer to allow adjusting ambient, diffuse, specular, and shininess lighting properties.
Added host profiles for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboriatories' Cmax system.
Increased the maximum number of characters allowed in file and dataset names from 1023 to 2047 in the XDMF reader.
Added ability for internallauncher to launch single-processor parallel engines.
Removed the host profiles for the NERSC edison machine.
Removed the CCM reader.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.0.1:
The Python command line interface documentation generation has been reversed so that developers now modify the rst files in the Sphinx documentaion first and then automatically generate the MethodDoc.C and MethodDoc.h files.

New in VisIt 3.0.0 (May 1, 2019)

General features added in version 3.0:
VisIt has been enhanced to support outputting Cinema databases. Cinema is an image-based database that offers low-cost interaction with simulation data. When viewing a Cinema database through a Cinema viewer, the viewer merely changes the image from the database in response to changes in camera angle and other visualization parameters rather than performing potentially expensive I/O, computational and rendering operations. Viewers and more information about Cinema can be found at CinemaScience.
Images can consist of RGB pixel images and composite images that enable VisIt to bring together multiple plots independently in the Cinema viewer. Cinema databases can be created using the Save Cinema wizard, accessible by selecting Save to Cinema... from the File pulldown menu on the main control panel.
VisIt has been enhanced to support rendering 3D images using the OSPRay. OSPRay features interactive CPU rendering capabilities geared towards scientific visualization applications. Advanced shading effects such as ambient occlusion, shadows, and transparency can be rendered interactively, enabling new insights into data exploration. OSPRay rendering is only available if VisIt has been compiled with OSPRay support. OSPRay is currently supported on Linux and Windows platforms.
To enable OSPRay rendering bring up the Rendering options window by selecting Rendering... from the Options pulldown menu, switch to the Advanced tab and select OSPRay rendering at the bottom of the tab. All plots except for the Volume will use OSPRay for 3D rendering when enabled through the Rendering options. OSPRay rendering for the Volume plot is enabled through the Volume plot attributes window by setting the Rendering Method to Ray casting: OSPRay.
Note that panning and zooming doesn't currently work with OSPRay rendering.
The CLI now provides a DatabasePlugins() function that returns a dictionary containing a tuple of the available database plugins for a host.
VisIt has been enhanced so plots can provide custom animation behaviors. These behaviors are plot-specific and are independent of the time slider animation controls. For example, the Vector plot can alter the length of its glyphs periodically lengthening and shortening them. Plot animation is enabled for the Curve and Vector plugins and can be activated by right-clicking on a plot in the Main window's plot list area and selecting Animate from the context menu. Note, this features works best for plots and data that can be rendered quickly.
Some of VisIt's expressions can be built with support for OpenMP, letting them parallelize over multiple threads. This is available when passing -fopenmp to the C++ compiler when building VisIt. The observed speedups are between 2x and 10x when using the serial compute engine. These expressions are enhanced with OpenMP support:
addition +
multiplication *
vector decompose []
magnitude()
lambda2()
q_criterion()
gradient() (for logical gradient case only)
Libsim's VisItRestoreSession() function will now attempt to broadcast the session file contents to other MPI ranks rather than having all ranks read the file.
When exporting to Curve2D or saving the Window in curve format, a comment style can be selected, with choices being Ultra ("#"), and Matlab ("%"). Ultra style is the default.
VisIt has been enhanced to leverage VTK-m for some operations. VTK-m is a version of VTK that has been rewritten to support multi-core architectures. It is based on a recent version of VTK-m. VTK-m support will only be available if it has been built with VTK-m support. VTK-m support can be enabled in one of two ways.
When using the graphical user interface, bring up the Preferences window by selecting Preferences... from the Options menu and change the Parallel Computation Library: to VTKm. This setting will be directly below the Floating point precision: setting and will only be visible if VisIt has been built with VTK-m support.
When VTK-m support is enabled, VisIt will use VTK-m for all operations that support it. The following operators currently support VTK-m.
Contour plot: Restrictions - Only supports node centered variables.
Isosurface operator: Restrictions - Only supports node centered variables.
Slice operator: Restrictions - Only works when Project to 2D is disabled.
VTK-m functionality is currently enabled for 3D rectilinear, curvilinear and unstructured grids with only hexahedral elements. VTK-m supports both single block and multi-block grids.
In order for VTK-m filters to perform better than VTK filters the number of cells in a block must be fairly large, typically at least 1 million cells. Furthermore, there is some overhead in converting between VTK and VTK-m representations that will impact performance. Lastly, checks have been put in to make sure that the data sets being processed are supported by VTK-m and these can impact performance as well. Checking if a variable is node centered or 3D is inexpensive, whereas checking if an unstructured grid contains only hexahedra is expensive.
Due to lack of availability of C++11 compliant compilers, support for OSX 10.8 has been dropped.
The Remote Profiles tab in the Host profiles will now allow importing profiles from the currently running release as well as from the trunk.
VisIt now has a Remap operator under the Geometry menu. This operator supports datasets of single- and multi-domain cell-centered scalars on structured and unstructured grids. It converts the data to a rectlinear grid with user-defined resolution and span. Variables can be specifed as intrisic (like density) or extrinsic (like mass).
Changes in GUI behavior in version 3.0:
The Set Save options window has been enhanced with a section that lets the user select which pixel data will be saved when an image is saved. The usual RGB data can be selected as well as alpha, depth, luminance, and value data. When alpha data are requested, VisIt's images will feature a transparent background that simplifies compositing of VisIt-generated images in other tools. Depth information results in a filename.depth.Z file being saved. Luminance information saves a separate image file with gray-scale luminance values. Value images save a 32-bit floating point image with plot scalars; this works with Pseudocolor plots.
VisIt can now save images into OpenEXR format via the Set save options window. OpenEXR files save additional precision and let images contain RGBA data and other image data such as depth, value, and luminance.
File format reader changes in version 3.0:
The Image reader plug-in was extended to expose a depth variable. The depth variable serves up data from the filename.depth.Z file if it exists, enabling depth data to be plotted in addition to color data. A depth file is a zlib-compressed file of 32-bit floating point numbers storing the Z-buffer for the image. The depth file can be requested by selecting depth pixel data in the Set save options window.
An OpenEXR reader was added to VisIt.
An ffp database reader was added to VisIt courtesy of Olivier Cessenat.
The Curve2D reader can now read curve files with Matlab-style comments.
The Vista plugin was removed.
The VTK writer was enhanced to optionally triangulate (2D) or tetrahedralize (3D) any UNstructured mesh output.
Corrected a bug plotting Nek5000 data, where VisIt displayed an error message indicating that the plot yielded no data when plotting the result of an expression involving a gradient with 2D data.
Changes to VisIt's plots in version 3.0:
The ray-casting volume renderer in VisIt's Volume plot was sped up in many instances. For rectilinear data, the speed increase can be over 2x, depending on the opacities in the transfer function.
The Vector plot supports plot animation. The vector glyphs alternate between 50% and 100% of their glyph length while the plot animates, helping to see features in the vector field.
The Curve plot supports plot animation. The line and time cue features in the plot can respond to plot animation and they advance from left to right while the plot animates.
When Min or Max is chosen for Pseudocolor plot, a color can now be chosen for those values below the minimum or above the maximum.
The setting for the Label plot's Label height has been replaced with a Font scale. Other options affecting font that were added include Font name, Bold, and Italic. We attempt to ensure old settings from python scripts, session files and configuration files are replicated as closely as possible, however the new label size may not exactly match how things looked in previous versions of VisIt.
Changes to VisIt's operators in version 3.0:
A new Grid Information query was added so the individual types, sizes, and extents of domains in a multidomain mesh can be obtained. This feature is useful in scripts.
Changes to VisIt's expression language in version 3.0:
The conn_cmfe expression was enhanced to handle mapping cell data between point meshes and polygonal or polyhedral meshes where the number of points and polygons or polyhedra match. This didn't work previously in the case of polygons because while the number of cells matched the number of points didn't. Now the number of points is ignored. It didn't work in the case of polyhedral meshes because polyhedra are split into zoo elements, which results in the number of cells not matching. Now the splitting is taken into account.
Improved the pos_cmfe expression so that it better handles pyramid and wedge cells in the donor mesh.
Changes to VisIt's picks and queries in version 3.0:
The Pick Operator now supports swivelling the camera focus to center on the current pick. This can be accessed through the GUI by checking the Swivel focus check box. If you are using the python interface, you can turn this ability on and off by setting the boolean variable swivelFocusToPick within the pick attributes.
Two related features have been added to the Pick operator, and these are the ability to force a user-defined pick label and the ability to remove all previous picks that have the same label as the current pick. When used in conjunction, you can create a specialized pick operator that, with every new pick, removes all previous picks that contain the same user-defined label. As of now, these options are only accessible through the python interface pick attributes. To force a user-defined label, set the boolean variable overridePickLabel to True, and set forcedPickLabel to your chosen label. To remove all previous picks with the same label, set removeLabelTwins to True.
The Pick operator now supports highlighting node picks.
Default index for Onion Peel operator was changed from 1 to 0.
Other bugs fixed in version 3.0:
Corrected a bug where VisIt would crash rendering transparent geometry on the Cooley system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
Corrected a bug where VisIt would randomly crash rendering transparent geometry due to memory corruption.
ANNOTATION_INT facelists with faces appearing in more than one sublist are now handled correctly.
Corrected a bug that caused empty plots when using the Onion Peel operator with data containing enumerated subsets.
Corrected a few usability issues for the Save movie wizard including:
The ability to save a movie template file.
The ability to set start and end frames when creating a movie template.
Pressing the enter key while modifying will no longer advance to the next page.
Corrected a bug in creating expressions with curves read from multi-domain silo files.
Fixed parallel engine hang when attempting to plot data from VTU (.vtu) files.
Fixed viewer crash when using the Transparent Color option for an Image annotation object.
Configuration changes in version 3.0:
Host profiles were added for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' Shark system.
Host profiles were added for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' Lassen and Sierra systems.
Host profiles were added for the Argonne National Laboratories' Theta system.
Enhanced the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' custom launcher so that VisIt would display to VNC displays.
Build changes in version 3.0:
Added the ability to create RPM packages via --create-rpm in build_visit.
Improved checksum checking of downloads such that python sub-modules are also checked.
Ensure md5 and shasum checksum commands are handled correctly on OSX.
Added checksum variables for most packages thereby triggering checksum verifcation upon download.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.0:
VisIt has been ported to use the git/master branch of the IceT compositing library.
avtGenericDatabase now dumps some intermmediate results of its dataset collection when -dump is in effect.
The command line option -svn_revision was replaced with -git_version.

New in VisIt 3.0.0 Beta (Mar 15, 2019)

General features added in version 3.0:
VisIt has been enhanced with support for outputting Cinema databases. Cinema is an image-based database that offers low-cost interaction with simulation data. When viewing a Cinema database through a Cinema viewer, the viewer merely changes the image from the database in response to changes in camera angle and other visualization parameters rather than performing potentially expensive I/O, computational and rendering operations. Viewers and more information about Cinema can be found at CinemaScience.
Images can consist of RGB pixel images and composite images that enable VisIt to bring together multiple plots independently in the Cinema viewer. Cinema databases can be created using the Save Cinema wizard, accessible by selecting Save to Cinema... from the File pulldown menu on the main control panel.
VisIt has been enhanced to support rendering 3D images using the OSPRay. OSPRay features interactive CPU rendering capabilities geared towards scientific visualization applications. Advanced shading effects such as ambient occlusion, shadows, and transparency can be rendered interactively, enabling new insights into data exploration. OSPRay rendering is only available if VisIt has been compiled with OSPRay support. To enable OSPRay rendering bring up the Rendering options window by selecting Rendering... from the Options pulldown menu, switch to the Advanced tab and select OSPRay rendering at the bottom of the tab.
The CLI now provides a DatabasePlugins() function that returns a dictionary containing a tuple of the available database plugins for a host.
VisIt has been enhanced so plots can provide custom animation behaviors. These behaviors are plot-specific and are independent of the time slider animation controls. For example, the Vector plot can alter the length of its glyphs periodically lengthening and shortening them. Plot animation is enabled for the Curve and Vector plugins and can be activated by right-clicking on a plot in the Main window's plot list area and selecting Animate from the context menu. Note, this features work best for plots and data that can be rendered quickly.
Some of VisIt's expressions can be built with support for OpenMP, letting them parallelize over multiple threads. This is available when passing -fopenmp to the C++ compiler when building VisIt. The observed speedups are between 2x and 10x when using the serial compute engine. These expressions are enhanced with OpenMP support:
addition +
multiplication *
vector decompose []
magnitude()
lambda2()
q_criterion()
gradient() (for logical gradient case only)
Libsim's VisItRestoreSession() function will now attempt to broadcast the session file contents to other MPI ranks rather than having all ranks read the file.
When exporting to Curve2D or saving the Window in curve format, a comment style can be selected, with choices being Ultra ("#"), and Matlab ("%"). Ultra style is the default.
VisIt has been enhanced to leverage VTK-m for some operations. VTK-m is a version of VTK that has been rewritten to support multi-core architectures. It is based on a recent version of VTK-m. VTK-m support will only be available if it has been built with VTK-m support. VTK-m support can be enabled in one of two ways.
When using the graphical user interface, bring up the Preferences window by selecting Preferences... from the Options menu and change the Parallel Computation Library: to VTKm. This setting will be directly below the Floating point precision: setting and will only be visible if VisIt has been built with VTK-m support.
When using the Python scripting interface, make the following call:
SetBackendType("VTKm")
When VTK-m support is enabled, VisIt will use VTK-m for all operations that support it. The following operators currently support VTK-m.
Contour plot: Restrictions - Only supports node centered variables.
Isosurface operator: Restrictions - Only supports node centered variables.
Slice operator: Restrictions - Only works when Project to 2D is disabled.
VTK-m functionality is currently enabled for 3D rectilinear, curvilinear and unstructured grids with only hexahedral elements. VTK-m supports both single block and multi-block grids.
Due to lack of availability of C++11 compliant compilers, support for OSX 10.8 has been dropped.
Changes in GUI behavior in version 3.0:
The Set Save options window has been enhanced with a section that lets the user select which pixel data will be saved when an image is saved. The usual RGB data can be selected as well as alpha, depth, luminance, and value data. When alpha data are requested, VisIt's images will feature a transparent background that simplifies compositing of VisIt-generated images in other tools. Depth information results in a filename.depth.Z file being saved. Luminance information saves a separate image file with gray-scale luminance values. Value images save a 32-bit floating point image with plot scalars; this works with Pseudocolor plots.
VisIt can now save images into OpenEXR format via the Set save options window. OpenEXR files save additional precision and let images contain RGBA data and other image data such as depth, value, and luminance.
File format reader changes in version 3.0
The Image reader plug-in was extended to expose a depth variable. The depth variable serves up data from the filename.depth.Z file if it exists, enabling depth data to be plotted in addition to color data. A depth file is a zlib-compressed file of 32-bit floating point numbers storing the Z-buffer for the image. The depth file can be requested by selecting depth pixel data in the Set save options window.
An OpenEXR reader was added to VisIt.
An ffp database reader was added to VisIt courtesy of Olivier Cessenat.
The Curve2D reader can now read curve files with Matlab-style comments.
Changes to VisIt's plots in version 3.0
The ray-casting volume renderer in VisIt's Volume plot was sped up in many instances. For rectilinear data, the speed increase can be over 2x, depending on the opacities in the transfer function.
The Vector plot supports plot animation. The vector glyphs alternate between 50% and 100% of their glyph length while the plot animates, helping to see features in the vector field.
The Curve plot supports plot animation. The line and time cue features in the plot can respond to plot animation and they advance from left to right while the plot animates.
When Min or Max is chosen for Pseudocolor plot, a color can now be chosen for those values below the minimum or above the maximum.
Changes to VisIt's operators in version 3.0:
A new Grid Information query was added so the individual types, sizes, and extents of domains in a multidomain mesh can be obtained. This feature is useful in scripts.
Changes to VisIt's picks and queries in version 3.0
The Pick Operator now supports swivelling the camera focus to center on the current pick. This can be accessed through the GUI by checking the "Swivel Focus" box. If you are using the python interface, you can turn this ability on and off by setting the boolean variable "swivelFocusToPick" within the pick attributes.
Two related features have been added to the Pick Operator, and these are the ability to force a user-defined pick label and the ability to remove all previous picks that have the same label as the current pick. When used in conjunction, you can create a specialized pick operator that, with every new pick, removes all previous picks that contain the same user-defined label. As of now, these options are only accessible through the python interface pick attributes. To force a user-defined label, set the boolean variable "overridePickLabel" to True, and set "forcedPickLabel" to your chosen label. To remove all previous picks with the same label, set "removeLabelTwins" to True.
The Pick Operator now supports highlighting node picks.
Default index for OnionPeel operator was changed from 1 to 0.
Other bugs fixed in version 3.0:
Corrected a bug where VisIt would crash rendering transparent geometry on the Cooley system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
ANNOTATION_INT facelists with faces appearing in more than one sublist are now handled correctly.
Corrected a bug that caused empty plots when using the OnionPeel operator with data containing enumerated subsets.
Corrected a few usability issues for the Save Movie Wizard including:
The ability to save a movie template file.
The ability to set start and end frames when creating a movie template.
Pressing the enter key while modifying will no longer advance to the next page.
Corrected a bug in creating expressions with curves read from multi-domain silo files.
Configuration changes in version 3.0:
Build changes in version 3.0
Added the ability to create RPM packages via --create-rpm in build_visit.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.0
VisIt has been ported to use the git/master branch of the IceT compositing library.
avtGenericDatabase now dumps some intermmediate results of its dataset collection when -dump is in effect.
The command line option -svn_revision was replaced with -git_version.

New in VisIt 2.13.3 (Nov 2, 2018)

New in VisIt 2.13.2 (Jun 6, 2018)

Bugs fixed in version 2.13.2:
Added back the disabling of using High-Resolution drawing on OSX versions at 10.10 or higher since it causes rendering issues on Retina Displays.
Added UNC style path support for Windows. This should resolve problems saving/reading config files when running on diskless images, and remove the necessity for setting VISITUSERHOME environment variable.
Corrected several errors in the NERSC host profiles. The haswell_interactive and knl_interactive profiles for cori had the partition set when they shouldn't have. The regular profile for edison had an invalid node to processor ratio.
Corrected a serious memory leak where the graphical user interface could easily go over 1 gigabytes in memory usage. Memory was leaked each time the active plot was changed as well as when plots were added, deleted, hidden or shown.
Corrected a bug, introduced in version 2.13.1, opening multipart Silo files that had a .root extension.
Corrected a bug on Windows, introduced in version 2.13.1, where clicking the 'Change username' option in the password window when connecting to a remote host would prevent the password window from reappearing.
Enhancements in version 2.13.2:
Added host profiles for the LLNL rzalastor machine.
The Explode operator has been added. This operator allows users to extract and manipulate the materials and cells of their datasets through "explosions" of different origins. There are three types of origins allowed: point, plane, and cylinder. When exploding materials, the dataset's materials are extracted and displaced in a direction and distance derived from their relationship to the origin. Exploding cells produces a similar effect, but with cells rather than materials. There are a number of options available to users for refining the behavior of explosions, such as tuning the force applied to the materials/cells during explosion, deciding whether to explode the cells of a material or the entire dataset, and having the ability to layer multiple explosions over one another. For more general information on this operator, visit our Sphinx documentation. For a tutorial on making movies using the explode operator, visit our Wiki page.
Added some minor enhancements to the ffp and unv readers.
Enhanced the array_decompose() expression function to specify components by name (string) as well as pick the closest component to that specified in the expression.

New in VisIt 2.13.1 (Apr 6, 2018)

Bugs fixed:
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:
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:
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.

New in VisIt 2.13.0 (Nov 9, 2017)

New in VisIt 2.12.3 (Jun 28, 2017)

Bugs fixed in version 2.12.3:
The Pick window wouldn't update the number of tabs displayed if picks were performed after changing the number of tabs, but before 'Apply' was clicked.
A bug was corrected with the reading of numpy files on Windows.
A bug was corrected with expressions involving multiple matvf functions using the same material name.
A bug was corrected with query-over-time where it would yield different results in certain instances than repeatedly changing the time state and querying the value. In particular, for Boundary plots or when an Isosurface operator were used.
The Silo plugin was modified to prevent the plugin from searching for the first non-empty sub-block on namescheme'd multi-block objects for which block-level empty objects were not written. As specified in previous release notes, such Silo files are considered invalid. Now, the Silo plugin will enforce this.
A bug was corrected with the ignore-missing-blocks logic in the Silo plugin that lead to potential mdserver crashes.
A bug was corrected with the Xdmf reader where the number of components in cell-centered attributes was incorrectly calculated in some instances.
A bug was corrected where data from a collection of VTK files grouped together with a visit file could not be clipped when the files contained PolyData and the first file had no cells or points.
Enhancements in version 2.12.3:
The Parallel interactive pdebug host profile for Jadeita at Lawrence Livermore National Laboriatory was modified to set the number of nodes and the time limit.
The Parallel interactive pdebug host profile for Agate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboriatory was modified to set the time limit.
The ANSYS reader was improved support for more general kinds of NBLOCK format strings.
Host profiles were added for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboriatories' Rztopaz system.
The GUI performance was improved on databases with large numbers of variables. One of the effects of this change is that expressions which are normally automatically created by VisIt can be disabled. If this happens, you will be presented with a warning message that it has occurred and some actions you may take, if desired, to override it. We believe this will impact very few users.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.12.3:
Build_visit was modified to no longer apply a patch to Python when using the Intel compiler since the patch is now included in the version of Python we are using.
Build_visit was modified to always set the rpath when building Python, not just when using the gcc compiler.

New in VisIt 2.12.2 (Apr 26, 2017)

Bugs fixed in version 2.12.2:
A bug was corrected with the BOUT++ database reader, where holes in the mesh or other artifacts would appear when two adjacent radial rows in the mesh had the exact same zshift values
A bug was corrected where VisIt would sometimes go into scalable rendering mode and then immediately go back out again, resulting in a blank image
A memory leak was eliminated from the Radial Resample operator
A bug was corrected in the Silo database reader where it would invalidate all the objects in the database when it encountered multi-block objects for which no block-level sub-objects exist. Although this problem is corrected, attempts to open any such poorly constructed Silo file can lead to unacceptable performance issues simply opening a file. Such Silo files are considered invalid
A bug was corrected in the Silo database reader where fuzzy logic to match multi-vars to multi-meshes was getting inadvertently triggered even for multi-var objects that correctly specified their multi-mesh via the DBOPT_MMESH option
The Silo database reader was modified to remove logic to skip empty single-block mesh and variable objects from getting added to database metadata to ensure the existence of such objects does not vary with time
Enhancements in version 2.12.2:
VisIt was ported to and installed on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' Rzgenie and Rztrona systems
Host profiles were added for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboriatories' Ansel, Jadeita and Mica systems
Host profiles were removed for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' Rzalastor, Rzcereal and Rzthriller systems, which were retired
The SubdivideQuads operator is now included by default. It is located in the Geometry category in the Operators menu. The operator subdivides quadrilateral surface elements and is typically used to eliminate rendering artifacts that occur in some situations
The custom lancher for LLNL's borax, quartz, rzgenie, rztrona, agate and jade systems was modified to add the paths to the MPI libraries to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH so that VisIt would launch in parallel even if the user didn't have the LD_LIBRARY_PATH set properly
Support for point and cell data was added to the Radial Resample operator
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.12.2:
Setting HAVE_LIBXXX for thirdparty libraries have been moved out of the root CMakeLists.txt file and into the SetUpThirdParty macro, except for the few that use a label other than HAVE_LIBXXX (like Nektar++ which uses HAVE_NEKTAR_PP, where the HAVE_ flag is set in the Find module instead

New in VisIt 2.12.1 (Jan 19, 2017)

New in VisIt 2.12.0 (Nov 10, 2016)

General features added in version 2.12:
The integration with SeedMe.org has been improved. A window was added to the graphical user interface to easily upload, share data and create videos from image sequences. Go to "File->Seedme" to bring up the window in the graphical user interface. More information can be found at http://visitusers.org/index.php?title=Seedme.
Advanced features added in version 2.12:
The experimental merge_tree, split_tree, and local_threshold expressions were added to VisIt. They are serial-only implementations for segmentation using the topology of a scalar field. The merge_tree and split_tree expressions take an input scalar and create a new scalar field with segmentation labels. The local_threshold expression takes a scalar field and a segmentation label and applies a local threshold metric to create a new scalar field.
Numpy is now included in VisIt's Python interpreter.
File format reader changes in version 2.12:
The Cosmos++ database reader has been updated with new features and bug fixes.
Fixed a bug in the Exodus database reader with the node ordering of hex27 elements.
Several of the ASCII-based database readers (PlainText, Curve2D, Lines, Rect, etc.) were upgraded to support on-the-fly decompression via gzstream. This means VisIt can directly read a gzip'd input file in these formats. Previously, this would have been handled through VisIt's ZipWrapper database reader but this new apporach is simpler and more efficient for simple ASCII-based files. This capability does not currently extend to ASCII-based formats that are read via other libraries such as VTK, MFEM, etc. In addition, as part of this enhancement VisIt's Save Window feature can now save gzip'd compressed curve formats. In this case, the quality slider selects the gzip level in the range [1..9]. Some of the ASCII Export Database formats were also enhanced.
Changes to VisIt's plots in version 2.12:
Enhanced the Pseudocolor plot to allow specifying the endpoints of lines independently. The Pseudocolor attributes in the Python scripting interface have also changed as a result of this. The endPointType and endPointStyle fields have been replaced with tailStyle and headStyle (which can be one of None, Spheres, Cones).
Fixed a bug with the Pseudocolor plot where displaying lines from the IntegralCurve operator as tubes could cause some of the lines to disappear.
Fixed a bug with the Pseudocolor plot where displaying lines as ribbons would cause the engine to crash.
Changes to VisIt's picks and queries in version 2.12:
Fixed a bug with the XRay Image Query where giving bad variable names would cause the engine to crash.
Other bugs fixed in version 2.12:
Fixed a bug where simulations instrumented with Libsim using a batch-style integration would crash when evaluating expressions.
Fixed a bug with simulations instrumented with Libsim using a batch-style integration were not able to use operator-created variables.
Fixed a bug where exporting streamlines caused the engine to crash because it was trying to save integral curve objects that no longer existed.
Fixed a crash with some of the parallel Python simulation examples.
Configuration changes in version 2.12:
VisIt was ported to and installed on Los Alamos National Laboratories' Trinity system. A host profile was added for running in client/server mode from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Build changes in version 2.12:
build_visit was enhanced to build version 1.2.4 of the SeedMe Python Client.
Fixed a bug with build_visit building GDAL on OSX 10.11
Fixed a bug with build_visit building XDMF where XDMF_SYSTEM_ZLIB and XDMF_SYSTEM_LIBXML2 where incorrectly set to OFF. They are now set to ON, to indicate that we are getting those libraries from the VTK build.
Fixed make install to install the correct OSX Qt frameworks and libraries.

New in VisIt 2.11.0 (Sep 25, 2016)

The re-architecting of the Parallel Integral Curve System was completed:
The re-architecting of the Parallel Integral Curve System (PICS), which formed the basis for functionality such as the Streamline and Poincare plots, has been completed. The changes began with the 2.9 release and provide a more flexible system with increased functionality. The most recent change in 2.11 is the removal of the Streamline plot. The same functionalty can now be achieved using the IntegralCurve operator and the Pseudocolor plot. The new system consists of four operators that feed their results into the Pseudocolor plot for display. The operators include the IntegralCurve, LCS (Lagrangian Coherent Structures), LimitCycle and Poincare operators. The Pseudocolor plot has been enhanced to be allow it to render lines in the same manner as the Streamline plot. For example, the Pseudocolor plot can now display lines as tubes and add spheres to the ends of the lines to show seed points. The Streamline Info query has been replaced with the Integral Curve Info query. For more information on using these operators, see the Parallel Integral Curve System in VisIt on the visitusers.org wiki.
Advanced movie making capabilities have been added:
The qplot and visit_flow Python modules are now included as part of the standard VisIt distribution. The qplot module contains plotting routines based on Qt. The visit_flow module contains a dataflow infrastructure for compositing and annotating images. Together these two modules allow users to create sophisticated movies using VisIt. See the Advanced movie making tutorial on the visitusers.org wiki for a detailed tutorial on using these modules to create a movie.
New color tables have been added:
The inferno, plasma, magma and viridis color tables from matplotlib were added to VisIt. These color tables were developed to be perceptually uniform and more friendly to color blindness. For more details see https://bids.github.io/colormap/. These color tables are available under the CCO license. Thanks to Akshay Subramaniam of Standford for providing the ct formated variants of these tables.
The viridis_light color table, contributed by Robert Blake of LLNL, formally at John's Hopkins, was added to VisIt. Low saturation on the lower end of viridis can make it hard to use in 3D settings where lighting is applied. This variant helps address this.

New in VisIt 2.10.3 (Jul 7, 2016)

Bugs fixed in version 2.10.3:
Fixed a bug in the LAMMPS database plugin that caused axis scaling to always be applied.
Fixed a bug with command recording where it would report the name of the function for getting the pick attributes as "PickAttributes" instead of the correct name "GetPickAttributes".
Fixed a bug where VisIt could not draw a Mesh plot of a .vtu file with only points (no cells) defined.
Fixed a few issues related to the Pseudocolor plot's use of ColorTable opacity: the viewer crashed when creating a transparent colortable with the command line interface; the Pseudocolor plot was affected by changes to a ColorTable it wasn't utilizing; changing the opacities of a ColorTable associated with a Pseudocolor plot would cause the Pseudocolor plot to go blank.
Fixed a bug using system python on Windows, error parsing added arguments.
Fixed a bug in the EnSight database plugin with EnSight Gold files where the geometry file name was specified by wildcards and a '001' numbered geometry file did not exist.
Fixed a bug with the PLOT3D database plugin that prevented multigrid, Fortran binary PLOT3D files from being read successfully.
Fixed a bug with the PLOT3D database plugin that prevented multigrid, Fortran binary, double-precision, iblanked PLOT3D files from being read successfully.
Fixed a bug that caused invalid expression variables after deleting a plot and switching back to its active source.
Fixed a bug with picking on the reflected part of a Subset plot with the Reflect operator applied.
Changed how MFEM Meshes are constructed to avoid a coordinate system problem with the high-order Nedelec case.
Fixed a bug with the Volume plot attributes window involving widgets losing focus as data was typed.
Fixed problem adjusting symbol sizes in curves for any symbol type other than point.
Prevent leading slash character in expression names from causing empty submenus.
Enhancements in version 2.10.3:
The Resample operator was enhanced to handle polygon cells.
The Cosmos++ database plugin was enhanced to support reading particle data.
Added optional input and output frames per second options to visit_utils.encoding.encode. These enable more precise frame rates for ffmpeg outputs.
Several parameter names were changed to make the visit_utils.qannote, visit_utils.qplot, and visit_flow python modules have a consistent interface.
visit_utils.qannote.MultiProgressBar was changed to use percentages for the segment ranges and input position.
Added a warning message to VisIt's CLI when a file named 'visit.py' is found in the current working directory at CLI startup. When this happens the 'visit.py' file is imported instead of VisIt's actual python client interface, which breaks the CLI. This happens rarely, but has confused users and developers so we wanted to detect and explain the situation.
The Silo database plugin was enhanced to, in certain circumstances, load up the block decomposition of a mesh as variable. The resulting variable is then availabe for use in operators, such as Threshold, where it can be used as a poor man's subset selection.
Improved memory scaling for the SPH Resample operator. Also, rewrote large portions of the SPH code to improve overall efficiency.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.10.3:
Build_visit's python support was updated to use python distutils to determine the proper python library directory when using system python installs.
Fixed a bug with build_visit where the Mili library wouldn't build properly without a fortran compiler in your path.

New in VisIt 2.10.2 (Apr 1, 2016)

New in VisIt 2.10.1 (Mar 10, 2016)

Bugs fixed in version 2.10.1:
The VisItAddPlot() function in Libsim was incorrectly using the global "Apply operators to all plots" setting when creating plots. The behavior for VisItAddPlot() has been changed so new plots are not created with previously applied operators to more closely match the operation of the VisIt CLI
Large tecplot files can now be read on Windows
A potential memory overwrite was fixed in the Fortran visitgetenv function in Libsim
Fixed a bug where the QT4 include and archive files were missing after doing a 'make install'
Re-enabled adaptive csg discretization for Windows, which was inadvertently disabled for previous release
Fixed a bug with the PF3D database plugin where the time and cycle were reported as zero for all the time states accessed after the initial time state accessed
Fixed a bug preventing the reading of DOS-formatted .visit files on Linux
Fixed bug whereby setting 'ssh command' would not work correctly on Windows. If the path to ssh contains spaces, the full path and command need to be surrounded in double-quotes, eg "C:\Program Files (x86)\Putty\plink.exe". If manually adding this to an .xml host profile, the quotes and path-separators should be escaped: "\"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Putty\\plink.exe\""
Fixed a bug opening Silo files larger than 4 Gbytes on Windows
Fixed the tensorVectorMult bug in the SPH Resample Operator found by Cody Raskin
Fixed a bug that prevented the SPH Resample Operator from working with the Volume Plot
Fixed handling of buggy mmesh_name member of multi-block objects in Silo files
Enhancements in version 2.10.1:
VisIt now permits the -socket-bridge-host command line argument to override the host name passed to compute engines when VCL starts a socket bridge. This is useful for login nodes that are attached to multiple network interfaces such as on BlueGene/Q where compute nodes may need to attach to the socket bridge host (typically the LAC node) using an alias
The PF3D database plugin was enhanced so that it reads the new multi level file format
The SPH Resample Operator now supports zone-centered data
VTK's higher order elements are now exposed via Libsim
The Silo database plugin now supports all-empty multi-block objects
The interpretation of "_meshtv_searchpath" and "_visit_searchpath" was changed in the Silo database plugin. If the search path is blank it will now be ignored instead of causing the plugin to ignore all variables located in subdirectories. The plugin will now ignore all variables located in subdirectories when the search path contains a path that doesn't exist in the Silo file. This change in behavior was necessitated when we discovered that codes had been unintentionally outputting Silo files with blank search paths for years. Because the Silo plugin wasn't handling a blank search path properly, this never caused a problem. When the behavior was fixed in VisIt 2.10, VisIt no longer displayed the variables in the subdirectories in its menus when it encountered such a file. Since we couldn't fix all the existing files, we decided to change the interpretation of the search path in VisIt
The pre-built Ubuntu distributions now contain support for reading ITAPS files
The PDB Z File database plugin was enhanced to support marker meshes and variables
The MFEM database plugin was updated to use MFEM 3.1, which provides support for MFEM AMR meshes.
The ADIOS database plugin was upgraded to use ADIOS 1.9.0

New in VisIt 2.10.0 (Nov 14, 2015)

General features added in version 2.10:
VisIt's Simulation window was enhanced so it can display up to 500 simulation commands
VisIt was enhanced to enable launching parallel jobs using sbatch/ibrun
Advanced features added in version 2.10:
A new VisItExportDatabaseWithOptions() function was added to Libsim. The function is like VisItExportDatabase() except that it takes a 4th argument that lets the simulation pass an option list. An option list is a set of key/value pairs that lets the simulation provide write options for the selected writer plug-in.
VisIt's export mechanism has been enhanced with support for "Write Groups". When writing out data on HPC systems, independent file writes often provide the best performance up to around a few thousand MPI ranks. After that, file system limitations begin to emerge and it makes sense to coordinate access to the parallel file system to get overall faster performance. Write groups are an optional feature provided in the Export window that enable VisIt to partition its MPI ranks into smaller groups of user-specified size. The MPI ranks within each group then coordinate their access to the file system. This can reduce contention and improve overall performance. On systems such as NERSC's edison machine, partitioning a VisIt job into groups of 48-96 processors can greatly improve export performance. The optimal size of the write group depends on the size of the VisIt job and the amount of data being written.
Some file format plug-ins can tell VisIt that they want geometry from various MPI ranks aggregated on rank 0 so a single file can be written. At scale, writing aggregating geometry to a single MPI rank is extremely costly and VisIt risks running out of memory. For formats that aggregate data, write groups improve scalability by aggregating data onto the leader rank of each write group, which then writes out the data to the file format. This will result in more files but exports will be faster.
The write group functionality is available by passing an option list to Libsim's VisItExportDatabaseWithOptions() function.
Libsim's VisIt_VariableData object was extended so you can optionally supply it with multiple data arrays, each representing a separate component of data. This enhancement permits VisIt to accept non-contiguous simulation data without first converting that data to a contiguous representation. This is a particularly useful feature for array-of-structure data structures and will reduce Libsim's memory overhead. Data arrays using the new setArrayData functions can have one or more components, which have their own base address and associated offset and stride. All of the previous setData functions continue to work and remain the preferred method for passing contiguous data to Libsim. The flexibility offered by the new setArrayData functions allows simulation data to be used directly (zero-copy) in situations that would previously have required a copy of the data.
In addition, this new functionality can be used to create the desired interleaved view of coordinates that are stored in separate arrays.
Data passed via the new setDataArray functions are supported for mesh coordinates and variables. Certain other use such as specifying unstructured mesh connectivity are not currently permitted.
Libsim's Fortran bindings were enhanced so the visitsetmpicommunicator function passes an MPI communicator by its integer handle. Thank you to William T. Jones for this improvement.
Libsim's runtime library was improved so when it is used in batch mode, it loads color tables broadcast from rank 0 to lessen the demands on the file system. This reduces Libsim initialization time.
Libsim's runtime library was enhanced so it can be initialized with a set of user-specified plot and operator plugins. Restricting the number of plot and operator plugins is useful in batch mode and it can dramatically improve initialization time. Plugins are specified using -plotplugins and -operatorplugins command line arguments passed to the VisItSetOptions() function. Each argument takes a comma-separated list of plugin names or id's.
Changes in GUI behavior for version 2.10:
The 2D Line annotation interface was enhanced to allow the line color to be the same as the foreground color, and to provide a style setting.
A 3D Line annotation object has been added.
Session files can be saved and loaded from a remote host.
The Set save options window was overhauled. The Standard Save and Advanced Multi-Window Save tabs have been replaced with an Aspect ratio and resolution section and a Multi-window save section. The Aspect ratio, Width, Height and Screen capture controls have been moved into the Aspect ratio and resolution section. The tiled and advanced multi-window save controls have been moved into the Multi-window save section. The Stereo control has been moved into the Format options section.
File format reader changes in version 2.10:
The PLOT3D reader has been enhanced in the following ways:
Auto-detect the format options normally specified by the .vp3d meta file or via Read options. Auto-detection works for most binary files, but not for ascii. It is always on, and if successful, will override the values specified in the .vp3d meta file or Read options. If not successful, the reader will fallback to use the other settings.
Support time-series solution files, specified in the form 'somefile*.q', (where '*' matches a number specifing the timestate) or 'somefile??3?.q'. Use the '?' form to sub-select from the time series. The q filename in this form can be used in the .vp3d meta file, or via Read Options. The '.q' extension is the default. If you want VisIt to parse the time value from the filenames, turn off the new "Solution Time field accurate" read option.
Support non-record based Fortran binary files. (Auto detection of options may fail).
Additional Read options were added for specifying Gas constants R and Gamma used in calculating functions like Temperature, Pressure, Enthalpy and Entropy. The defaults used are 1.0 and 1.4 respectively.
The wiki page was updated with the latest information for reading PLOT3D files.
The Nek5000 reader had an issue with #std 8 data files (double size data). The data dimensions would be read wrong. This has been fixed.
VisIt can now read .vtm VTK multiblock files. Exporting multi-block data as VTK XML format will now write out .vtm files instead of .visit for grouping the indidividual blocks.
The Pixie reader now supports ghost zones (thanks to Jean Favre).
VisIt can more reliably export data to Tecplot format in parallel.
VisIt can export XYZ format data in parallel.
VisIt's Tecplot reader can now export datasets that use other than single floating point precision.
The Mili reader now returns the time information so that it can be displayed in the database legend, the time slider, and queries over time.
A bug was corrected in the Silo reader that caused "_meshtv_searchpath" to be ignored. Support for reading "_visit_searchpath" as a synonym for "_meshtv_searchpath" was also added since that name is much more appropriate for VisIt. The utility add_visit_searchpath was added that adds a "_visit_searchpath" to the root directory of a Silo file.
The Mili library used by the Mili plugin was updated to Version 15.1
Changes to VisIt's plots in version 2.10:
A bug was fixed with the scatter plot, where VisIt would give an error if it generated any empty domains.
Changes to VisIt's operators in version 2.10:
The LCS operator has been overhauled. It now allows for calculation of both the eigen values and eigen vectors. When eigen vectors are calculated the results may be passed down to plots such as the Vector plot and operators such as the LimitCycle operator. The vectors passed down stream can be the calculated eigen vectors or a shear vector (i.e. a combination of the eigen vectors). Other additions include the ability to use an auxiliary grid when calculating the Cauchy-Green Tensor. Numerous bug fixes have been done to improve the results when spurious integral curves are encountered.
The LimitCycle operator has been added. It is designed to find limit cycle flow fields. The operator works by using a line to define a series of evenly spaced seed points along the line that are then advected. The advection stops when the integral curve intersects the line (or a predetermined stopping criteria). A zero crossing is then searched for in adjacent pairs of integral curves. The zero crossing is present by the dot product of the vectors formed by the starting and intersecting points from each integral curve. The zero crossing is found via a bisection method that adds a new seed point between the original points. The number of iterations can be set as well as the tolerance for finding the zero crossing. As this operator is part of the PICS code other parameters are similar to other PICS operators. Currently only a line may be defined.
Many new features have been added to the PICS operators as well as fixing many bugs with them. All the PICS operators now allow for advecting in directionless fields. This new feature allows one to use directionless fields such as those associated with eigen vectors. In addition, bug fixes for boundary checks and cell lookup have been done. Bug fixes for advecting in multiple domain data sets in parallel have also been done.
A bug was fixed with several of the operators, where VisIt would give an error if the operator generated any empty domains. These include the CoordSwap, EllipsoidSlice, Extrude, Isovolume, SphereSlice and ThreeSlice operators.
The SPH Resample operator has been added.
Other bugs fixed in version 2.10:
A bug was corrected that could cause VisIt to hang initializing network connections when connecting from a Windows system to a Linux system with ssh forwarding over a gateway.
2D Line annotation has been fixed so that adding arrowheads does not make the line disappear.
A bug that caused a warning message to pop up when adding Image Annotation objects has been fixed.
2D axis titles have been fixed so that a color other than foreground color can be used.
Libsim's internal buffer for retrieving the user's environment was fixed at 10Kb, which is not large enough to accommodate some users' environments. The environment retrieval code has been rewritten to handle arbitrary sizes.
The splatting render mode in the Volume plot was corrected so it would no longer change graphics settings in a way that could corrupt the rendering of other plots such as Pseudocolor.
Calling the Libsim function VisItExportDatabase() from a batch-only simulation would silently fail to export files for file format writers that provided database options (e.g. the VTK writer and Silo writers). This fix ensures that those file formats work for export from batch simulations.
The VTK reader was serving up invalid time values for files that did not have time.
A bug was fixed with the NamedSelection and SmoothPolyData filters, where VisIt would give an error if the filter generated any empty domains.
Fixed a case where VisIt's Recenter expression could SEGV if it encountered some domains with zero points and/or zero cells.
The internal launcher now adds unknown arguments before the "-s script_name" argument and not between the script name and the script arguments.
The advanced multi-window image save capability was modified to initialize the background to white.
Interactive connections to simulations are unable to save images via VisItSaveWindow() because the simulation was always passing a server output directory and interactive saves are currently done client-side. The code was modified so the simulation may opt to output to the current directory and that will save files client-side where VisIt was invoked.
Deleting multiple plots using Libsim's VisItDeleteActivePlots() function would crash when used in batch mode.
Silo export on a file that contained more than one mesh can produce output that contains the wrong mesh name.
Makemili now works once again. Starting with VisIt 2.9, the VisIt launch script adds "-forceversion version_number" to the front of the command line options for all the tools that it runs. In the case of makemili, this resulted in it interpreting the version number as the name of the file to process. Now it will interpret the "-forceversion" option and properly gets the name of the file to process.
Configuration changes in version 2.10:
The LLNL RZ and CZ only host profile options were removed from visit-install since it is confusing to users and is only useful when installing VisIt on the LLNL RZ and CZ networks, which is only done by developers. The LLNL RZ only host profile option was removed from the Windows installer since that is also confusing to users and isn't useful to anyone.
The "parallel pshort" launch profile was removed from the Zin host profile since the pshort queue was removed.
Build changes in version 2.10:
The SeedMe python client was updated to version 1.1.0.
Experimental support for the Damaris I/O middleware layer (http://damaris.gforge.inria.fr/) was added to build_visit. Due to the use of XSD, Damaris support is GPL only. You can use the following build_visit flags to create a build that includes Damaris: --gpl --cmake --mpich --python --boost --vtk --qt --xsd --xercesc --damaris
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.10:
Adding a 'd' character to the argument to the -debug command-line option (e.g. -debug 3d) will cause level 1 debug logs, and only level 1 debug logs, to be decorated with __FILE__ and __LINE__.

New in VisIt 2.9.2 (Jun 17, 2015)

Bugs fixed in version 2.9.2:
Libsim functions VisItSaveWindow, VisItExportDatabase, and newer functions for adding and managing plots were only functional in batch mode. This update fixes the affected functions so they are also functional when VisIt interactively connects to the simulation.
The Fortran bindings for Libsim have been corrected so that the visitsetupenv2 and visitgetenv functions are named appropriately.
Some small memory leaks in Libsim's batch mode have been corrected.
Plots which show polygonal data (such as Pseudocolor) were not showing the right data on the right cells for cell-centered fields for 2D datasets that contain line cells in addition to polygonal cells.
The image_pan parameters to the XRay Image query are no longer truncated to integer values.
The Label plot's display of logical indices was fixed for multi-block data with varying dimensions per block.
The IndexSelect operator's Wrap option will now work correctly for domain-decomposed data.
Enhancements in version 2.9.2:
The graphical user interface for the XRay Image query was updated to use the new view description as well as support the background intensity parameter.
The XRay Image query was enhanced to also output the path length field when outputting in rawfloat or bov format. The intensities will be in the files output00.bov - outputXX.bov and the path lengths will be in the files outputYY.bov - outputZZ.bov, where XX is nBins-1, YY is nBins and ZZ is 2*nBins-1.
The XRay Image query was enhanced to support output file familying. When file familying is enabled the output files are named outputXXXX.YY.EXT, where XXXX is the family number, YY is the bin number, and EXT is the output file type extension. Furthermore, when file familying is enabled, the query will not overwrite existing files. When file familying is disabled, the output file outputYY.EXT will be overwritten each time the query is run, consistent with the previous behavior. File familying is controlled with the family_files setting to the query from the command line interface and with the Family output files setting in the graphical user interface. The default is for file familying to be disabled when using the command line interface and for file familying to be enabled when using the graphical user interface.
The XRay Image query was enhanced to support outputting the bounds of the ray bundle to a VTK file to aid in verification of the setup of the rays. The rays will be output to the file "ray_bounds.vtk". The setup can be verified by adding a Mesh plot of "mesh" from the file "ray_bounds.vtk" to the object to be xrayed. Outputting the bounds of the ray bundle is controlled with the output_ray_bounds setting to the query from the command line interface and with the Output ray bounds setting in the graphical user interface.
Added support for FELINESEG type in Tecplot plugin.
The command line interface no longer starts automatically when the file "visitrc" exists in the users ".visit" directory. The command line interface will now start on-demand when the user brings up the Macros window or the Macros window is posted or set to be visible on startup.
The Maintain view limits setting on the Advanced tab in the View window is now also saved when saving settings, not just when saving a session.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.9.2:
Support was added for using the CUDA profiler. The CUDA profiler is enabled with the "-nvprof" command line option, for example, to launch the serial engine with the CUDA profiler use "visit -nvprof engine_ser".

New in VisIt 2.9.1 (May 9, 2015)

New in VisIt 2.9.0 (Mar 10, 2015)

New in VisIt 2.8.2 (Feb 27, 2015)

Configuration changes in version 2.8.2:
A host profile was added for LLNL's Surface system.
A host profile was added for LLNL's Rzgpu system.
The host profile for LLNL's Edge system was deleted.
The default bank was changed from "bbronze" to "wbronze" for all the hosts in the LLNL closed network configuration.
Bugs fixed in version 2.8.2:
A node ordering issue for quadratic elements in Exodus files was corrected.
VisIt is once again able to read multi-file Exodus files.
The internal launcher was modified so that by default it does not pass -ppn to mpiexec and mpirun when launching a parallel job. If the user needs to have the internal launcher pass -ppn to those commands then they will need to override that behavior in a custom launcher.
Lineouts that do not intersect the plot no longer issue a 'No input' error message for each successive lineout. The previous behavior of issuing a 'yielded no data' status message for only the lineouts that do not intersect a plot has been restored.
An issue where blocks in subset plots were not correctly outlined when the wireframe option is selected was corrected.
Pseudocolor plots of nodal variables defined on structured multi block meshes no longer crash the compute engine.
An issue generating structured ghost data that could cause a Filled Boundary plot of an AMR mesh to crash the compute engine was corrected.
The VisIt launching script was modified so that arguments that it adds to the argument list are added at the beginning of the list instead of the end of the list so that argument passing for scripts works properly.
VisIt now uses significantly less memory when processing CSG meshes with many regions. In one instance, a subset plot of a CSG mesh consisting of about 36000 spheres that was using over 250 gigabytes is now using about half a gigabyte.
VisIt no longer crashes when discretizing CSG meshes with the Multi-Pass method when the number of boundaries in a region exceeds an internal limit. It now issues a warning message and tries the uniform discretization method.
Enhancements in version 2.8.2:
The zonetype expression now produces labels that are 3 characters long. It also supports most of the VTK element types.
The XRay Image query now supports specifying the image view with the full generality of the 3d view for plots. The new view parameters currently can only be specified through the Python scripting interface.
Several improvements were made to the Exodus database reader. These include:
Improving the automatic format detection of by adding *.ex.#.# and variants as extension patterns for Exodus files.
Adding support for meshes with arbitrary polyhedral elements.
Adding support for global node and element numbers.
Several improvements were made to the ViSUS IDX database reader. These include:
Always using view-dependent data loading for clipping, which reduces I/O.
Forcing the manual selection of the hz level for 3D datasets when the MultiresControl operator is used.
Adding support for midx metavolumes that facilitate mixing heterogeous volumes and remote data sources.
The Multi-Pass CSG discretization method was enhanced to only process duplicate boundary surfaces once. This results in better quality discretizations, a reduction in the amount of memory used, and an improvement in processing speed.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.8.2:
The NERSC custom launcher was modified so that the internal launcher will pass -ppn to the mpiexec and mpirun commands when launching parallel jobs.

New in VisIt 2.8.1 (Feb 27, 2015)

Bugs fixed in version 2.8.1:
Eliminated a problem-sized memory leak introduced in VisIt 2.8 that affected many of VisIt's filters.
Corrected a bug with Python callbacks failing for viewer RPC's with no arguments.
Corrected a bug with the multipass CSG discretization method where it created incorrect results in regions where one or more boundaries was referenced multiple times and the total number of boundaries in the mesh was greater than 512.
Corrected a bug where Pick, Query and the Onion Peel operator would return inconsistent results when using the same zone or node ids, when the database supplied ghost zones.
Mesh plots of arbitrary polyhedra now display properly when the Onion Peel operator has been applied.
NumZones and NumNodes queries now return the correct count for arbitary polyhedral data when using the original data.
The VisIt GUI no longer crashes when opening the Preferences window.
Enhancements in version 2.8.1:
Several enhancements were made to the BOUT reader. These include:
The ability to read variables containing ghost zones.
Being more tolerant of data type variations in the files, such as allowing a "short", "int" or "long" for scalar integer values.
Adding more error checks for bad values.
Upgraded to Silo version 4.10.1
VisIt now uses the same version for all components when the user specifies a version number with a minor version number. For example, if the user specifies "visit -v 2.7.1" it will use version 2.7.1 for all the components. If the user specifies a version number without a minor version number then it will behave as before and launch the latest version in that series.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.8.1:
The build_visit script was modified so that it will use the equivalent of --svn-anon in the absence of any svn related flags when using the trunk version of build_visit. This will avoid the situation of using a specific visit release of the source code with the trunk version of build_visit, which may not be compatible with any releases.

New in VisIt 2.8 (Feb 27, 2015)

New in VisIt 2.7.3 (Jun 9, 2014)

Configuration changes:
The partition was changed from "pbatch" to "pgpu" for the "parallel pgpu" launch profile for LLNL's max system.
The default bank was changed from "bdivp" to "bbronze" for all the hosts in the LLNL closed network configuration.
The default launch profile was changed to "serial" for LLNL's muir and graph systems.
The "parallel views" launch profile was replaced with the "parallel interactive pdebug" launch profile for LLNL's muir system.
The VisIt installations that used the CHAOS operating system at LLNL were modified so that they use an older version of the NVIDIA driver that works properly with the desktop systems at LLNL.
The gateway host was changed to red-wtrw.lanl.gov in the host profile for LANL's cielo system since the old gateway cluster was retired.
A host profile was added for LLNL's zindev system.
Host profiles were added for the Swiss National Supercomputing Center's rosa and daint systems.
Bugs fixed:
Fixed a bug with ray-casted volume plots where it wouldn't correctly parse a compound variable (eg "earth/water/temperature") when in log-scale mode (ticket #1778).
Fixed a bug with command recording for Time picks that resulted in an empty 'time_options' argument (ticket #1780).
Fixed a failure with Pick and Query from the CLI with a single non-default variable specified in 'vars' argument (ticket #1784).
Fixed a bug that could crash the engine or deliver bad results when Index Select operator applied to a Contour plot (ticket #1462).
Fixed host-profile creation on Windows to include full 'host.domain' as host Alias.
Fixed a bug in the Chombo reader that prevented the AMRStitchCell operator to work on 2D datasets. Corrected an error message in AMRStitchCell operator.
Fixed a bug in saving multiple lineout curves.
The internal launcher was modified so that VisIt would work on systems where the OpenGL libraries were located in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
The VisItSetMPICommunicator() function in libsim was fixed.
The Datalevel comparison wizard was fixed so that it doesn't create expressions with nested .
Fixed a bug with the Pseudocolor plot not using the correct data extents when Material selection was applied and the data limits were based on the current plot.
The GetProcessAttributes() function, which returns information about the engine or viewer, was not updating the returned values when called multiple times for the compute engine.
In build_visit, the CONFIG_SITE env var was cleared to avoid third party lib installs using a lib64 directory style.
Fixed a problem where SIL selection for 1D, wedge meshes didn't work properly.
Enhancements:
It is now possible to specify an initial frame value when creating images via the movie wizard or the command line option -movie. This allows starting the series at an initial frame instead of frame 0. This option can be specified in the movie wizard on the "Chose Length" page or with the command line argument "-frame value".
In zoom mode for 2D and 3D views the shift left mouse will now pan, a simple left mouse will continue to rectangular rubber band zoom and a ctrl left mouse will unzoom. The shift left mouse pan action matches the Navigate2D/3D mode for panning. Previously in zoom mode the shift left would create a square zoom and was not used heavily.
Several enhancements were made to the BOUT++ reader. They include:
The absolute value of the variable is displayed when displaying a variable on the diverter.
The grid above the upper X point is not displayed in a two X point grid.
The entire lower diverter is now displayed. You can use the subset window to eliminate portions of the lower diverter if you want to do so.
The upper diverter is now displayed in a two X point grid.
The multi-pass discretization of CSG meshes was enhanced so that it now supports a maximum of 512 boundaries per region instead of 512 boundaries in the entire mesh.
The VisIt executables available on the web site for Mac OS X, Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 and Ubuntu 11.04 now contain support for ADIOS.
Build_visit builds ADIOS on a larger range of platforms.
An ellipsoid slice operator was added.
Changes for VisIt developers:
A compile bug with nek5000 thirdparty jl library support using xlC compiler was fixed.

New in VisIt 2.7.2 (Mar 21, 2014)

Configuration changes:
A launch profile was added to the host profile for LLNL's max system for using the pvis partition.
A launch profile was added to the host profile for LLNL's zin system for using the pvis partition.
Bugs fixed in version:
Creating database correlations on Windows from the CLI, when databases are opened using relative paths, has been fixed.
Session files with time varying data can be restored via the CLI with different sources and have their time sliders work correctly.
An engine crash on Windows was fixed when cmfe expressions were passed an invalid filename.
A bug was fixed where a plot got put in perpetual 'pending' state when NamedSelections' 'Automatially apply updated selections' was checked before the selection had been applied to a plot.
VisIt's Annotation window has been fixed so that it is once again possible to select axis tick marks that are both inside and outside of the 3D bounding box.
The silent uninstall option on Windows (/S from command-line) now works again.
A problem with material selection in plots from files containing a mix of multi-block and single-block meshes at the same dir-level and also containing standard block grouping was corrected (ticket #866) .
The internallauncher was modified to correct a bug where the -N option was improperly set when using aprun to launch VisIt. Thanks Jean Favre for the fix.
The 2D and 3D zoom interactors once again unzoom the image when pressing the Ctrl key and the left mouse button.
Making movies with movie templates works again on Windows.
A small number of errors were fixed in the visit-install script. The "arl" and "asu" configurations are now supported with the "-c" option. The help text is now up-to-date and the configuration options are now listed in alphabetical order.
The ADIOS reader was fixed so that it now properly reads 3D uniform and rectilinear meshes.
A bug was fixed with a previous fix to the OnionPeel operater in VisIt 2.7.1 where it didn't properly handle the case where the seed cell was specified as a global cell number and material interface reconstruction was applied.
A bug with material indexing related to phony materials in the CaleHDF5 database reader was resolved.
Enhancements:
The Cosmos++ reader has been extended so that accepts either combined or separate grid and data files. When static meshes are used, a single grid dump can now be provided, regardless of the number of data dumps.
Two new 2D quad mesh quality metrics (min_corner_area and min_sin_corner) were added.
Changes for VisIt developers:
The build_visit script was modified to build MPICH 3.0.4 instead of 3.0.1 so that MPICH would build on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 systems.
The build_visit script was modified so that the MPICH library it builds is compatible with the Uintah library.
The build system was modified to add -DMPI_NO_CPPBIND and -DMPICH_SKIP_MPICXX to VISIT_PARALLEL_CFLAGS and VISIT_PARALLEL_CXXFLAGS so that the xdmf_writer sample programs could be built with more versions of MPI.

New in VisIt 2.7.1 (Jan 22, 2014)

Bugs fixed in version 2.7.1:
The VTK reader was fixed so that non-integral ORIGIN specifications for StructuredPoints datasets are handled correctly.
The BOUT reader was fixed so that it will work properly when VisIt is started in a directory other than the one containing the data files.
The OnionPeel operater was modified to properly handle the case where the seed cell was specified as a global cell number and material interface reconstruction was applied.
The OpenFOAM reader now accepts '*.foam' files as long as they are in the same directory as the controlDict.
Sampling options have been added to the Lineout query widget. They apply on a per-lineout basis and override the global settings available in the Controls->Lineout window.
Memory leaks in the viewer related to operator-created-expressions have been fixed.
Running the python interpreter no longer fails when running a version of Vist that is not the newest one installed when more than one version of VisIt is installed in the same location.
A bug that could cause opening a Nek5000 file to fail if the user had a visit config file saved from version 2.6.x has been corrected.
Tickmarks and gridlines are now properly drawn when saving a window in non screen-capture mode.
Enhancements in version 2.7.1:
The basic NetCDF reader was enhanced to load zone-centered variants of all variables under the 'as_zonal' submenu.
The BOUT reader was enhanced so that it will read grids with a circular geometry and grids with two X points.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.7.1:
The windows source distribution has been fixed so that a binary distribution can be sucessfully build from it (the _PACKAGE target).
An AMRTest reader was added that demonstrates how to create a simple AMR database reader. It generates the data internally. To use the reader you should create a zero length file that ends with ".amrtest" and open it. It has 6 levels and has a single variable that creates a Mandelbrot image. It also works with the 2d multi resolution capabilities. To invoke them bring up the "Rendering options" window and select "Multi resolution for 2d AMR data" on the "Basic" tab.

New in VisIt 2.7.0 (Nov 2, 2013)

New in VisIt 2.6.3 (Jul 19, 2013)

Configuration changes in version 2.6.3:
Serial and parallel host profiles were added for LLNL's rzcereal system.
The gateway host was changed to rfta15.lanl.gov in the host profile for LANL's cielo system since the old gateway cluster was retired.
Bugs fixed in version 2.6.3:
The algorithm for generating tubes (i.e., Tube operator) has been significantly improved, removing artifacts seen in previous versions.
VisIt's frontendlauncher script now sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH so VisIt's internal Python interpreter can properly locate Python shared libraries within the VisIt installation.
VisIt once again honors any plugin directories specified by the VISITPLUGINDIR environment variable. Some sites use the environment variable to point multiple users to a custom plugin directory.
VisIt now always passes "-l username" to ssh when making remote connections when running on Windows since qtssh, the ssh utility VisIt uses on Windows, requires it.
The Windows installer now only installs VisIt's parallel components when the user requests it.
The Stop button in VisIt's animation controls now stops animations when used in PySide applications.
VisIt now properly reads pvti files. The previous version was incorrectly looking for a PImage element instead of a PImageData element.
The host profiles that are used to access the machines in the LLNL RZ through the RZ gateway were modified to remove the "llnl.gov" from the hostname since this was causing login failures for some users.
Ray-traced volume plots now correctly handle non-floating point scalars.
Material interface reconstruction now correctly handles polygons of arbitrary size.
The encoding of mpeg movies was updated to work with the newer version of ffmpeg.
Pressing the middle mouse button and moving the mouse up and down once again zooms and de-zooms the image while in 2d zoom mode.
The 2d and 3d zoom interactors once again constrain the zoom rectangle to a 1:1 ratio when zooming with the shift key and left mouse button pressed. Pressing the ctrl key and the left mouse button still pans the image.
Releasing the shift key before the left mouse button no longer results in the window being stuck in pan mode when panning with the shift key and left mouse button pressed while in 2d or 3d zoom mode.
The 2d and 3d interactors now ignore mouse wheel movements when any mouse keys are pressed to avoid strange behaviors in some situations.
The MFiX reader now supports files from MFiX version 1.8.
The VisIt launch script was modified to correct a bug that incorrectly identified the machine architecture on some Mac systems.
Enhancements in version 2.6.3:
The qtssh utility that is used to make remote connections when running VisIt in a client/server mode from a windows desktop has been enhanced to enable logging to facilitate troubleshooting connection problems. Qtssh is now also available on Mac and Linux systems so it can be used instead of the system installed ssh to troubleshoot connection problems on those systems as well.
To enable logging add "-log 'logfilename'" to the ssh arguments. It will then create a log with the specified name in your VisIt directory (My Documents/VisIt on Windows and $HOME/.visit on Mac and Linux systems.)
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.6.3:
The Python bindings for libsim no longer reference an additional libsimV2dyn shared library. This makes using the Python bindings easier so they work as intended.
The build_visit script now correctly turns off VisIt's VISIT_SLIVR flag if --slivr is not used.
The build_visit script now builds the NetCDF libraries before the ITAPS libraries.

New in VisIt 2.6.2 (Mar 26, 2013)

Bugs fixed in version 2.6.2:
When VisIt's compute engine was built without support for offscreen software rendering it could crash when drawing plots if the DISPLAY environment variable was not set. The compute engine will now issue a warning message when it needs the DISPLAY environment variable set instead of crashing. This only affects VisIt builds that do not include Mesa.
A threading error that surfaced when running PySide applications using -pysideviewer was removed from the Python interface. The threading error could cause the PySide application to lock up. This happened mostly on Windows.
VisIt's frontendlauncher script was fixed so it can be launched from a symbolic link.
A memory error was corrected in the Silo database reader that sometimes caused plots that involved materials to fail.
Fixed the filter string for loading/saving Python expressions so that files matching the filter will be displayed.
The Gadget reader was fixed such that opening a large number of files in a virtual database no longer fails on reopen.
A bug was fixed that caused a viewer crash when logical coords were selected for output.
Several problems were fixed with Nameschemes in Silo multi-block objects including using relative paths to reference external arrays.
Several problems were fixed with build_visit when it was used to build Silo with Silo's Qt-dependenent Silex tool enabled.
A bug was fixed so that -nopty is no longer required to run client/server from clients running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 systems.
Importing the VisIt Python module (import visit) in a system Python interpreter works again on UNIX-based platforms.
The EnSight reader now handles files with trailing spaces in EnSight case files written from FORTAN codes.
An unnecessary gradient calculation is no longer performed when using the Volume plot with raycasting integration.
A crash was fixed in the Silo reader when reading a future format that supports packed local domain boundary info.
Using the -sessionfile command line argument to restore session files could result in a race condition that caused other user settings to be applied after the session file was read, causing restored plots to be deleted.
A bug was fixed with the UNIC file reader for doing CMFE operations.
Enhancements in version 2.6.2:
A Python interpreter is now installed with VisIt when VisIt is built with Python support.
A number of changes were made to VisIt's frontendlauncher script in an attempt to resolve Python-related startup errors:
The shell and Python portions of the script have been separated, which means that VisIt no longer needs to write temporary script files on startup.
The shell portion of the script now attempts to locate a suitable Python interpreter within the current or most recent VisIt installations. If a suitable Python interpreter is located within VisIt's installations then that interpreter is used to execute VisIt's launch scripts. Otherwise, the system Python interpreter is used as before.
The Python portion of the script checks the Python interpreter version and quits with an error message when Python 3 is detected.
If the -X argument is given in the SSH arguments in a host profile, the -X argument will also be passed to the ssh command for gateway computers.
The Silo reader now reads species names when avalaible in Silo multispecies and species objects. The specified names are added to the end of the species name string shown in VisIt's Subset window.
The visit_utils module now includes a PySide based module (visit_utils.qannote) for rendering annotations on images.
The serial paraDIS reader now decomposes higher energy arms into low energy type 111 arms before analyzing the network.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.6.2:
The paraDIS reader now requires boost 1.36.0 or later to build.
The build_visit script now builds Silo 4.9.1. The reader will still work with Silo 4.9, but some of the bugs fixes mentioned above require Silo 4.9.1.

New in VisIt 2.6.1 (Feb 2, 2013)

VisIt Launch Script Fixes:
A correction was made to fix a problem where some command line arguments would be passed to subsequent components in the wrong order when the "-s script_file" option was used. In particular the internal launcher was modified so that all arguments that are passed on to subsequent components are passed before the "-s script_file" command line option.
The launch script was too aggressive about using the loopback interface when launching parallel compute engines on a local node. This interfered with the compute engine's ability to connect back to the viewer when run on a different node in a cluster from where the viewer was running. This problem was limited to running a parallel job on a login node or in an mxterm.
Running the visit command through a symlink caused it to fail and print There is no current version of VisIt..
A leak in the VTK library was corrected, preventing the viewer from leaking memory as the user interacted with plots. This leak was most likely responsible for instances of VisIt crashing when animating movies on-screen.
The Mesh plot and Label plot renderers each had a leak that caused the viewer to run out of memory when animating through time.
The Host, Path, and Filter controls in the File Open window would fail to respond to text input after connecting to a remote computer. Only Mac versions seem to have been affected.
VisIt will now look up a gateway computer's address, when one is present, instead of looking up the remote host name. This avoids errors when connecting to remote computers which are not visible outside of the gateway computer.
Performing a Lineout query on an integer field caused the resulting curve to also use integer precision for its coordinates. This prevented the curve from storing correct coordinates for fractional values.
The DDCMD file format reader was fixed so it can read sets of files whose aggregate size exceeds 4Gb.
The XRay Image Query has had several bugs corrected that sometimes resulted in artifacts in the output images. The artifacts occured when the cells had faces with small areas (less than approximately 1e-5) or when the cells had quadrilateral faces that were non-planar.
The compute engine's cell count variables were changed from integer to long precision. This fixes a problem where having over 1 billion cells in a dataset could cause the engine to think it was in scalable rendering mode and never send back an image to the viewer.
A bug was fixed whereby necessary support libraries were not installed, causing failure with Python Expressions.
A bug was fixed with exporting BOV files after using the Resample operator.
A bug was fixed with reading BOV files that have BYTE_OFFSETs bigger than 2^32 bytes.
A bug was fixed with picking Nek5000 files with more than one variable.
Several annotation types were not showing the proper time value in movies containing transparency when the parallel version of VisIt's compute engine was used. The time slider, text, and 3D text annotations were afflicted.
A bug was corrected with the Xdmf reader where it would incorrectly report that vector variables defined on multi block meshes were invalid.
The Xdmf reader was enhanced so that it supports reading the BaseIndex and GhostOffsets properties for structured grids.
A bug caused by an indexing error was corrected in depth cueing. Thanks Jean Favre for the fix.
Using 'import visit' from an installed python on Windows is again operational.
An error was corrected in the WriteScript python function where GetCurveView was incorrectly used instead of GetViewCurve. Thanks Jean Favre for the fix.
Pathlines again work when running in serial.
The FTLE operator no longer issues many print statements, which slowed down client-server performance.
A viewer crash when doing lineouts from the cli with incorrect parameters was fixed. An error message will now be generated instaead.
Extraneous Pick/Query log messages printed to visitlog.py and during Command recording were cleaned up.
VisIt's face list filter was fixed so it correctly extracts exterior faces from structured meshes whose dimension indexing does not begin at zero.
Enhancements in version 2.6.1:
The procid function was added to the Expressions window in the graphical user interface. It is located in the Miscellaneous category in the list of functions. The function has been in VisIt for a long time, just never visible in the graphical user interface.
The Cartographic Projection operator now supports poly data inputs and selecting the Central Meridian.
The UNV database plugin is now available on Windows.
Added new function isnan(x) to expressions. This function returns 1 if a variable is not a number (tested via z!= x returning true) and 0 otherwise.
The Silo database reader was enhanced to allow use Silo's DBMakeNamescheme method to handle externally referenced arrays and the support for possibly 'empty' blocks of a namescheme'd multi-block object.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.6.1:
VisIt's CMake configure system now records cmake invocation command line with passed -D options. This info is displayed at configure time and also used to create a 'reconfig_visit.sh' script.
VisIt now requires Silo 4.9. Build_visit was modified to build Silo 4.9.

New in VisIt 2.6.0 (Nov 30, 2012)

New in VisIt 2.5.2 (Aug 7, 2012)

Configuration changes in version 2.5.2:
Host profiles were added for LLNL's cab machine.
The host profiles for LLNL's atlas machine were removed because the machine was retired.
The partition in the host profile for ORNL's lens machine was changed from analysis to computation.
VisIt now runs the chaos 4 version on LLNL's rzbeast and gremlin machines instead of the default chaos 5 version.
The host profiles for the Flux and Nyx clusters at the University of Michigan Center for Advanced Computing were updated.
Bugs fixed in version 2.5.2:
Recent versions of Ubuntu can now make movies and launch the command line interface from the GUI.
Plots using variables created with the DataBinning operator would delete their actors when changing the active plots in the plot list. This caused the plot to appear in the Pending state and lead to unnecessary re-execution of the plot.
Clearing the pick points no longer turns off the Spreadsheet plot's tracer plane.
The Revolve operator now properly handles vector data.
Build_visit no longer hangs with the message "initializing qt vars" when run in graphical mode.
Plots made using data from a libsim-instrumented simulation did not update their SIL restrictions when the simulation called VisItTimestepChanged(). This could cause existing plots' SIL restrictions to become out of date with respect to the simulation.
Volume plots using the splatting renderer now support data with double-precision coordinates.
The Spheral reader no longer converts its data to floating-point, but passes it down the pipeline in its native double-precision format.
The text in the "Time slider" annotation object no longer partially overlaps the time slider bar when it contains characters with descenders (i.e. "g", "j", "p", "q" or "y").
Double-clicking on a '.visit' file on Windows once again starts VisIt with the related database.
The linux-intel version of VisIt no longer displays the error message:
Error opening plugin file:
usr/local/visit/2.5.1/linux-intel/plugins/databases/libMITAPS_MOABDatabase.so
usr/local/visit/2.5.1/linux-intel/plugins/databases/libMITAPS_MOABDatabase.so: undefined symbol: H5DSis_scale)
The Reflect operator will now correctly show the quadrant graphics on Windows.
The VisItSetMPICommunicator() function in Libsim has been fixed.
A bug was corrected with the X Ray Image query where it would crash when run in parallel for some combinations of processor count and image size.
Curve plots rendered by VisIt's scalable rendering mode are now complete when IceT image compositing is used.
Pressing stop when playing an animation with multiple plots now results in all the visible plots being drawn.
A blank image is no longer displayed when frame advancing with scalable rendering mode.
VisIt no longer runs out of memory when plotting curves with millions of points.
Command recording for saving a window now includes the actual SaveWindow() function call.
The VisIt Python module's LaunchNowin() function is now exposed immediately after the module gets imported.
Command recording now works when the visit Python module is imported into a standard Python interpreter using import visit.
Saving a window with transparent plots on Windows now correctly renders the transparent image.
Setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to VisIt's library directory prior to running a system Python is no longer needed to import the VisIt Python module.
Importing the VisIt Python module using from visit import * once again adds VisIt module functions to the top-level namespace.
NETCDF data no longer marks certain cells for later time slices when certain meta-data is set.
VisIt no longer gives an error message for new plots made from a CSG mesh after changing the mesh management settings.
Changing a Pseudocolor plot's opacity on Windows will no longer crash the Viewer or yield an empty plot.
The BOV Reader on Windows can now handle very large files with very large offset specifications.
The CCM reader can now be used with automatic file grouping.
Enhancements in version 2.5.2:
VisIt's support for the Manta raytracing library has been improved, including support for the Molecule plot and improved support for building Manta and integrating it with VisIt.
VisIt can now export data to Curve2D format, enabling X,Y curves to be saved to a text file. This method of data export is available even when VisIt is in scalable rendering mode (where the save as curve option does not work). Exporting to Curve2D format can save curves or data from any plot. Non-curve data is written out using the zone or node index of the data array as the X coordinate, with the data value as the Y coordinate. Non-curve data exported from plots of multi-domain databases results in multiple curve files.
Console output from remote mdserver or compute engines is now routed to VisIt's Output window. This ensures that the output is available for platforms such as MacOS X and Windows where the VisIt application does not use a console. Console output from those programs sometimes indicates the cause of client/server launch failures.
The Chombo reader can now handle anisotropic refinement ratios.
Libsim was extended so it can support variables defined on material subregions of the mesh. In order to declare that the variable exists only on a subset of the mesh, you must call the VisIt_VariableMetaData_addMaterialName() function, adding the names of the materials over which the variable is defined. If you do not call that function then, as before, the variable will be defined on the entire mesh. When you return the actual variable data from your simulation's GetVariable data callback function, you must take care to only provide data for cells that belong to the material regions that you specified. You would iterate over all cells in the mesh and if the material (or any mixed material) in the cell belongs to the regions of interest then that cell contributes to the returned data array. The procedure for nodal data is similar except that at each node in a cell, add the nodal data to the return array only if you have not visited that node before. Follow the link to see an example simulation.
Libsim was extended so variable data may be returned using the long type.
Libsim can now accept double-precision material volume fractions via the VisIt_MaterialData_setMixedMaterials() function.
Libsim can now accept double-precision species mass fractions via the VisIt_SpeciesData_setSpeciesMF() function.
Command recording will now prepend "visit." to commands when the visit module is imported into a standard Python interpreter using "import visit". This ensures that recorded commands can be played back.
The parallel scaling of the multi-pass CSG discretization has been improved. Additionally, the maximum number of boundaries that the multi-pass CSG discretization can handle has been increased from 128 to 512.
The NETCDF CCSM reader has improved identification of two-dimensional meshes.

New in VisIt 2.5.1 (Jul 25, 2012)

Configuration changes:
Host profiles for LLNL's rhea and minos computers were removed since those computers were retired.
Host profiles for LLNL's RZ computers, for running on RZ computers, no longer use rzgw. Host profiles for RZ computers for use with client/server continue to use rzgw as the gateway machine. End users should not notice a difference other than connecting to simulations now works on RZ computers.
Host profiles were added for LLNL's atlas computer.
Host profiles were added for LLNL's rzthriller computer.
A "parallel pshort" launch profile was added to the host profiles for LLNL's zin computer.
Bugs fixed:
VisIt's SSH program qtssh.exe has been turned back into a console application to solve connectivity problems to LLNL's RZ network.
A bug in the Silo reader that caused VisIt to malfunction with AMR datasets has been corrected.
The XRayImage query now correctly handles 3D rectilinear meshes.
The check on the maximum size that an image may be saved at was unnecessarily constraining in some situations. The new maximum size is now always 16384 by 16384.
The GDAL reader no longer fails because of unsatisfied external symbols from HDF5. Build_visit was modified to build the GDAL library without HDF5 support since this functionality of the library was not being used.
The Python CLI now works properly when installed for a single user on Windows.
The temporary filename created for the batch script that launches a compute engine in the batch system has been modified so that it can no longer have spaces.
Using the rubber-band zoom tool on Windows will no longer cause a crash.
VisIt's viewer would sometimes hang when using the Change username window while logging into a remote computer.
A type bug identified by clang in H5Part database plugin was resolved.
VisIt's CMake build system detection logic for Python features was improved:
Python is now conditional on VISIT_PYTHON_SCRIPTING OR VISIT_PYTHON_FILTERS.
PySide is now conditional on VISIT_PYTHON_SCRIPTING
Launching multiple VisIts simultaneously sometimes exhibited networking issues that prevented successful startup.
Problems building a plugin against the installed version on Windows has been resolved.
The dominant_mat expression could cause invalid material values (0's) to be present in its output when used with operations that could cause recentering or ghost-zone creation.
Enhancements:
VisIt's SSH program qtssh.exe, which enables VisIt to connect to remote computers on the Windows platform, has been upgraded. It is now based on a more recent version of PuTTY's plink program. This change enables much faster communication of results from the server to the client when VisIt is run in client/server mode.
Paul Stewart contributed the BATL reader to visualize BATS-R-US/CRASH code output.
The XRay Image query has been enhanced so that it can save images in BOV format.
The CGNS reader is better able to read unsteady flow or deforming meshes. Thanks to Mickael Philit!
The CGNS reader better supports meshes whose topological dimension does not match their spatial dimension (e.g. 2D meshes in 3D space). Thanks to Mickael Philit!
The ANSYS reader was improved so it can handle more variation in the file's formatting.
The Windows version of VisIt has been enhanced so the main executable programs that comprise VisIt contain more metadata. This enables Windows to provide more information about the VisIt programs to the user. For example, the program properties now show a description of the program as well as version. This change also enables the Windows Task Manager to show descriptive names for the VisIt executables, making it easier to determine the origin of the running programs.
Further improvements were made to the splatting renderer in VisIt's Volume plot.
The KeyframeAttributes type was exposed in the VisIt module so it can be created using a normal constructor.
PySide is now enabled on Windows.
From cli, pick no longer prints its output to terminal. It now returns a Python Dictionary of the results.
Experimental support for crack free isosurface extraction from AMR data has been added. Adding the option -create-ghosts-for-t-intersections to the engine arguments makes it possible to use the AMRStitchCell operator (disabled by default, needs to be enabled manually) to extract continuous isosurfaces from AMR data (tested for BoxLib and Chombo).
The VTK reader was enhanced so that it can read parallel VTK files. These are files with extensions "pvtu", "pvts", "pvtr", "pvti" and "pvtp".
VisIt can now get the initial port number that it uses from the VISIT_INITIAL_PORT environment variable. The provided value must be an integer greater than or equal to 1024. VisIt normally starts looking for available ports at port 5600.
The Windows version of VisIt's CLI supports a new -minimized command line argument that minimizes the CLI console window on startup.
Changes for VisIt developers in version 2.5.1
VisIt now requires CMake 2.8.8 or later. Build_visit was modified to build CMake 2.8.8.

New in VisIt 1.6 (Jul 9, 2007)

VisIt is now more proactive about deleting intermediate copies of datasets. Consequently, VisIt's memory footprint while processing data has been drastically reduced.
VisIt's treatment of rectilinear and curvilinear meshes has been substantially improved so rendering them is faster and uses far less memory. Specific improvements include: direct rendering of 2D rectilinear and curvilinear meshes, facelists of 3D structured meshes produce 6 2D structured meshes, orthogonal slices of 3D rectilinear meshes produce 2D rectilinear meshes.
VisIt now includes a Spreadsheet plot. The Spreadsheet plot allows users to select a single domain and "plot" its scalar data in a custom Spreadsheet window provided by the plot. The Spreadsheet window is tied to the plot that created it so you can have N Spreadsheet windows open to look at different domains or variables. The Spreadsheet window shows tabs that each contain a table for a slice through the data (1 table for 2D). It is possible to quickly step through the tabs to see different logical slices of the dataset. The slice is also depicted in the visualization window and the slice moves as you change slices in the Spreadsheet window. The Spreadsheet window contains controls for formatting the precision of the text output, coloring the displayed text using a color table, and switching the slice axis used to display the data. In addition, there are features such as min,max buttons to highlight the cells in the spreadsheet that contain the min,max values. Each Spreadsheet window contains its own menu, which provides options for selecting cells, saving selected cells to a text file, copying selected cells to the clipboard, and summing or averaging selected cells.
The ParallelAxis plot has a new Context rendering mode that condenses groups of lines into bands colored by the number of lines in each band. The helps to highlight the overall behavior of multivariate data because it highlights trends in line clustering using color. The individual lines between each axis can still be displayed and are useful when restricted (using the Extents tool) and drawn over the context. The ParallelAxis plot's attributes window has been completely redesigned in order to make adding axes and reordering them more intuitive.
It is now possible to set properties for VisIt's plot legends. Most plots create legends. For plots that create legends, a legend annotation object is also now created. The legend annotation object appears in the list of annotation objects in the Annotation window's Object's tab. When you select a legend annotation object in the Objects tab, the window will change to show the legend properties that can be set, including: whether VisIt positions the legend automatically, position, the format string used to display numbers, allowing you to control the number of significant digits, font, font size, font style (bold, italic), font color, scale the legend to make it larger or smaller, turn off parts of the legend, draw an optional bounding box under the legend to distinguish it from plots
This version of VisIt includes a much improved Python interface. You can use your favorite Python interpreter to build a VisIt module that can be included in scripts via "import visit". VisIt's Python interface also includes a new GetMetaData function that can be used to return a metadata object for a file. The metadata object can be used to steer sophisticated Python scripts that need to know the names and types of meshes and variables contained in a scientific database. Many Python bindings for plot attribute objects have been regenerated so they expose embedded objects. In the case of the Volume plot, this means that you can now use Python to directly design color tables and gaussian opacities for the volume transfer function. Finally, VisIt has been upgraded so it uses Python 2.5.
VisIt provides several new expressions and queries for detecting connected components within a mesh.
Many database reader plugins were enhanced in this release of VisIt and two completely new database reader plug-ins were added. For more information about the reader enhancements, please read the VisIt 1.6 Release notes when you install VisIt and run it for the first time.
VisIt users have contributed some new images to the VisIt Gallery page.