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 […]
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 […]
For some years now, researchers at Tecplot have been collaborating with a group at the Colorado School of Mines on a project, led by Dr. Mark Eberhart, to develop predictive software that can compute the bulk properties of materials from the electronic structure. The latest findings of the Tecplot Bondalyzer project have been published in the January issue of ChemPhysChem1. Previously referred to as Tecplot ChemBond, the 2012 blog, New visualization software helps […]
Blog #2 in the series The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge, by Dr. Scott Imlay Wind tunnels won’t go away—we’ll need them to store the printouts from our CFD solutions!—Dean Chapman, NASA Ames This is my second-hand memory of a quote attributed to Dean Chapman of NASA Ames as he gave the 1979 AIAA Dryden Lecture1. He was joking, of course, but the lecture was a serious look at the future […]
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 […]
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 […]
Using the software for data analysis often requires algorithms with many repeated operations, and in some cases many different operations. Tecplot engineers have created a macro language to streamline these operations. Macros are recordable, easy to edit, and don’t require any development experience. Quick Macro Panel Some commonly used complex and repetitive algorithms (within the aerospace community) have been incorporated into a dynamic Tecplot 360 interface called the Quick Macro […]
Sometimes the biggest challenge of any CFD project is getting your data into the correct file format. This script shows how to create Tecplot format files from MATLAB® data imported from simple text files. […]
Many clever ideas are presented each year at tech conferences and the like, and my job as Tecplot CTO is to make sure Tecplot is aware of the newest techniques and trends in visualization research. […]
Subzone load-on-demand (SZL) minimizes the amount of data loaded by Tecplot 360. The basic idea is to divide a large dataset into small pieces, or subzones, and load only those subzones needed for the desired plot. […]
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