ParaView

ParaView

By Elaine Jiang

Description

ParaView is an open-source, scientific visualization modeling tool owned by Kitware.  It has a GUI that allows users to model data without writing any code. It began in 2000 as a collaborative project between Kitware and Los Alamos National Laboratory and was funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative (ASCI). ParaView is primarily used to build visualizations and analyze large datasets. Data exploration can be done interactively through its GUI or programmatically using ParaView's batch processing capabilities. 

ParaView runs on distributed and shared memory parallel and single processor systems in order to display and analyze large datasets effectively. It can be run on Windows, Mac, and Linux, among other machines. It uses the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) library as the data processing and rendering engine and has a user interface written using Qt. 

Highlights

Metrics

Accessibility: The estimated time for someone to create Hello World in VR

Power: The engine's power - i.e. how much one can do with this

Usage:  Evaluation of software's use for the following purposes

Documentation

User Support

Final Thoughts

Paraview should have a source code display option so that users who are hoping to use the VTK library will be able to learn faster by converting back and forth between using the GUI in Paraview and examining its underlying VTK code. Although the time spent on making simple models through Paraview is drastically less than the time spent using VTK, the applications of Paraview are still limited if we don't have access to the code.

Sources

ParaView Overview. 2018, Kitware Inc. https://www.paraview.org/overview/