SZL Data Analysis – Making It Scale Sub-linearly!

Blog #6 in the Trillion Cell Grand Challenge, by Dr. Scott Imlay, Tecplot’s Chief Technical Officer Which came first, the chicken or the egg?—Aristotle In developing the technology to meet the Trillion Cell Challenge we struggled with the visualization version of this classic causality dilemma, and I finally have an answer! But first, a little background. Subzone Load-on-Demand (SZL) Technology As many of you know, Tecplot 360 utilizes a new […]

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Printed Plots That Scream "WOW"

Here are 10 tips for creating publication quality plots that make an impact. The Tecplot 360 User’s Manual has chapters on all of the topics discussed below and can be found in our documentation. Explore the Plot Gallery with hundreds of plot examples. Learn the best way to share your results with key players. Choosing the right output formats, color and layout help you present your results more effectively in […]

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Employee Profile: Tecplot Product Manager Scott Fowler

Scott Fowler is adventurous by nature, so it’s no surprise that he’s tackling his new professional role as Tecplot Product Manager with the same zeal that he brings to his favorite personal pursuits – namely rock-climbing, mountain biking and skiing. Crystal-clear Picture of Customer Needs Scott, a married father of two young sons, was recently promoted to the role that will make him the “face of Tecplot.” As the product […]

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Scaling to 300 Billion Cells – Results To Date

Blog #5 in the series The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge, written by Dr. Scott Imlay, Chief Technical Officer at Tecplot, Inc. “Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.” — Booker T. Washington In previous blogs, I’ve given the motivation for the Trillion Cell Challenge. In this blog I’d like to introduce the details of the challenge and give our results to date. Trillion-cell CFD Dataset At […]

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Intelligently Defeating the I/O Bottleneck

The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge blog #4 by Dr. Scott Imlay, CTO, Tecplot, Inc. Big whorls have little whorls That feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity. —Lewis F. Richardson This is a famous quote about the nature of turbulence: the energy in turbulence cascades down to smaller and smaller eddies until, at a certain length scale, the turbulence energy can be […]

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What Obstacles Stand Between Us and One Trillion Cells?

Blog #3 in the series The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge is about technology trends and the I/O bottleneck. Forecasting is very difficult, especially about the future. —Old Danish Proverb In previous blogs I’ve introduced the Trillion Cell Challenge and given the motivation for why it is a worthy goal. Now I’d like to start discussing the technical obstacles involved in visualizing a solution with one trillion cells. Basic Visualization Pipeline […]

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Tecplot 360 2015 Release 1 Now Available

Perform Complex Mathematical Data Transformations Using IF() Statements BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON—January 6, 2015—Tecplot, Inc. announced today that Tecplot 360 2015 Release 1 is now available for general use. Highlights of this release include: Conditional expressions in equations using IF() statements. Triangulation and advanced streamtrace seeding (by customer request). Arbitrary slice improvements to adjust the orientation of arbitrary slices. Improved options for appending data, drag-and-drop, and file dialog performance, especially on networks. […]

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The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge

By Dr. Scott Imlay, Tecplot’s Chief Technical Officer Tecplot’s large-data initiative began several years ago. We’ve spent tens of thousands of developer-hours on removing barriers to large-data visualization: adding parallelization (threading) of performance critical code, optimizing algorithms, and optimizing I/O. Since then, we’ve improved the large-data capabilities of Tecplot 360 dramatically. For example, with Tecplot 360 2014 Release 2, the creation of an iso-surface for a particular one billion cell data set is two […]

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Converting Your Data Files to Tecplot Subzone Loadable Format

As the years go by, more and more engineers and scientists are working with files containing hundreds of millions of cells, with billions on the horizon. Tecplot 360 introduced a new data file format called SZL or subzone loadable (filename extension .szplt) to address the needs of customers who are visualizing large data files, improving interactive performance, and simultaneously reducing memory requirements. When faced with the task of making large […]

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