For three years now, CFD software specialist Intelligent Light has been working to bring the open source visualization program VisIt into its family of industrial grade software products. Designed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists to visualize data coming off Department of Energy (DOE) supercomputers, VisIt scales well and is well-suited for in situ processing. These features are increasingly important to the engineering and manufacturing firms that Intelligent Light serves.
Thanks to over a million dollars in US Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants and the help of computer scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Intelligent Light has made significant progress modifying VisIt for industrial workloads, while it works to merge the government-developed code with its flagship CFD post-processing and visualization suite, FieldView.
As Intelligent Light explains, FieldView is already used by some of the largest manufacturers, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Toyota, but the company saw areas where FieldView could be improved and made more accessible to smaller companies. Integration with VisIt provides an avenue for more efficient data handling, in-situ processing, and the ability to scale effectively on larger HPC machines with thousands of processors.
Intelligent Light could have developed these features from scratch, but as company founder Steve Legensky reports, “the benefit VisIt provided was that it was already there.”And because VisIt has no licensing fees, integrating this open source solution with FieldView will mean lower costs for small- and medium-sized companies that use it on their HPC systems.
While open source products are free to use, they often lack features that make them suitable for commercial environments. Intelligent Light turned to the US Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which provides capital to transform DOE codes into tools that are accessible for a wider community.
The process of tailoring VisIt for industrial workflows began in 2012 with an SBIR Phase I grant of nearly $150,000 directed to studying the feasibility of this goal. This marked the beginning of the collaboration between computer scientists at Intelligent Light and researchers at Livermore National Laboratory.
The Phase II grant worth nearly $1 million moved the project further ahead towards the goal of a unified product. An interim solution will be available later this year, when Intelligent Light customers will be able to choose between the standard FieldView code and a new version of VisIt. “Essentially VisIt will be doing the same kinds of things FieldView does,” says Legensky, “not exposing the full functionality of VisIt, but rather emulating the functionality of FieldView.”