API Overview

1. Overview

NPACI's Scalable Visualization Toolkits (a.k.a. VisTools) are designed to support analysis, filtering, compositing, and rendering of very large multi-dimensional, multi-modal, time-varying data sets. The tools are specifically designed to enable use of data sets too large to fit in core (or swap) on systems ranging in power from desktops to teraflops.

To enable larger-than-core visualization, the VisTools transparently support paging of data in and out of memory on demand. They use intelligent pre-fetch and paging schemes to minimize data movement and lazy-initialization and lazy-evaluation to minimize computation. The toolkits are designed to be thread-safe, execute well on parallel architectures, and integrate easily with existing applications and toolkits.