Vistle - A Modular Data-Parallel Visualization System

vistle: very smooth and elegant, nicely put together (Urban Dictionary)

Vistle is an extensible software environment that integrates simulations on supercomputers, post-processing and parallel interactive visualization in immersive virtual environments. Vistle development is driven by HLRS since 2012.

License

Vistle source code is licensed under the LGPL v2.1. See LICENSE.txt for details. This does not apply to the subdirectory lib/3rdparty.

Installation

Installing with Spack

Add the HLRS Vis Spack repository to your installation of Spack:

  git clone https://github.com/hlrs-vis/spack-hlrs-vis
  spack repo add spack-hlrs-vis

Then you can install Vistle with this command:

  spack install vistle

macOS with Homebrew

Install most of Vistle's dependencies by invoking brew bundle within Vistle's root source directory. You can also install Vistle with

  brew install hlrs-vis/tap/vistle

Installing From Source

Build Requirements

• C++ compiler: support for C++14 (ISO/IEC 14882:2014) is required, known good compilers:

  • GCC (8-14)
  • Clang (Xcode 14, 15)
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2022

• CMake: at least 3.10, on Windows 3.15

• Boost: At least 1.66.00 is required. Note:

  • in order to switch MPI implementations without requiring a recompilation of Boost, we compile Boost.MPI together with Vistle

• Botan: Crypto and TLS for Modern C++ is used for verifying HMACs during connection establishment, version 2 or 3 should work

• MPI: Microsoft MPI, Open MPI, MPICH and MVAPICH2 has been used successfully. Multi-process installations strictly running on a single PC might get away with the patched copy of mpi-serial in lib/3rdparty/mpi-serial.

Server installations that are only used for performing I/O or computation (e.g. on HPC clusters) do not require the following components. Instead, they will need to connect to another instance of Vistle which handles all user interaction.

• Python: for interpreting Vistle workflow scripts (.vsl), Python 3 should work.

• COVISE/OpenCOVER: OpenCOVER or a version of COVISE including OpenCOVER compiled by you is necessary, get it from GitHub, needed for the COVER module and COVER plug-ins You can shorten the build process and cut down on dependencies by building only OpenCOVER. In addition you should set COVISEDESTDIR to a location where compiled COVER plug-ins should go. Hints: - The COVISE repository contains further information on how to build dependencies on Linux (README-Building-deps-linux.txt) and Windows (README-Building-deps.txt).

• OpenSceneGraph: the version of OpenSceneGraph that was used for compiling OpenCOVER

• Qt: The Qt 6 libraries Qt6Core, Qt6Widgets and Qt6Gui are required by the graphical user interface, alternatively also Qt 5 can be used.

You can set the environment variable EXTERNLIBS to a directory where Vistle should search for 3rd party libraries. It will search in e.g. $EXTERNLIBS/boost, if CMake is looking for Boost.

Getting Vistle

Getting Vistle is as easy as

  git clone --recursive https://github.com/vistle/vistle.git

If you need to update an existing working copy, then change to its directory and issue the following commands:

  git submodule sync --recursive
  git submodule update --init --recursive

Building Vistle

Create a subdirectory for building, change to it, and invoke CMake:

  cmake ..

Then build with your build tool, e.g.:

  make -j20

Invoking Vistle

Environment Set-Up

Vistle modules are run on clusters via MPI. You have to configure how they have to be spawned by providing a script named spawn_vistle.sh (or spawn_vistle.bat on Windows) somewhere in your PATH. It could be as simple as

  #! /usr/bin/env bash
  mpirun "$@"

But it also might require invoking your batch system. An example is provided in vistle/bin.

For COVER to find its plug-ins, you should add the directory from COVISEDESTDIR to COVISE_PATH.

Command Line Switches

Synopsis:

  vistle [--batch|--gui|--tui] [scriptfile]

Options:

• -b|--batch: do not start a user interface

• -g|--gui (default): start a graphical user interface on rank 0

• -t|--tui: start a command line user interface on rank 0

You can connect a user interface to a running Vistle session later on, e.g.:

  vistle_gui localhost 31093

Source Code Organization

• doc: documentation and tooling for building documentation

• cmake: CMake modules

• contrib/scripts: support scripts for building and running Vistle

• lib/3rdparty: 3rd party source code

• lib/vistle: Vistle libraries source code

  • lib/vistle/util: support code
  • lib/vistle/core: Vistle core data structures
  • lib/vistle/userinterface: common library for user interfaces
  • lib/vistle/net: library for Vistle network communication
  • lib/vistle/control: Python code for controlling a Vistle session
  • lib/vistle/module: base class and support code for visualization algorithm modules
  • lib/vistle/renderer: base class and support code for render modules
  • lib/vistle/rhr: library for remote hybrid rendering servers and clients

• app: Vistle applications

  • app/hub: Vistle session controller
  • app/gui: graphical user interface

• module: visualization algorithm modules and base library

  • module/general: modules useful to a wider audience
  • module/develop: various debugging aids
  • module/render: renderer modules transforming geometry into pixels
    • module/render/DisCOVERay: a parallel remote hybrid rendering server based on Embree (CPU ray-casting)
    • module/render/ANARemote: a parallel remote hybrid rendering server based on ANARI (various backends)
    • module/render/COVER: wrap OpenCOVER as a render module
      • module/render/COVER/plugin: plug-ins for OpenCOVER, e.g. for connecting to Vistle
        • module/render/COVER/plugin/RhrClient: OpenCOVER remote hybrid rendering client plugin

Documentation

Some documentation on Vistle is posted to vistle.io.