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

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

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

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

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

  • GCC (8-13)
  • Clang (Xcode 14, 15)
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2022

• CMake: at least 3.10, on Windows 3.15

• MPI: Microsoft MPI, Open MPI, MPICH and MVAPICH2 has been used successfully.

• Boost: At least 1.59.00 is required. Notes:

  • 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 1, 2 or 3 should work

• Python: for interpreting Vistle 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 5 libraries Qt5Core, Qt5Widgets and Qt5Gui are required by the graphical user interface, alternatively also Qt 6 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 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

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

  cmake ..

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

  make -j20

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.

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

• 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/test: 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/OsgRenderer: a parallel remote hybrid rendering server based on OpenSceneGraph (OpenGL)
    • module/render/COVER: wrap OpenCOVER as a render module
      • module/render/COVER/plugins: plugins for OpenCOVER, e.g. for connecting to Vistle
        • module/render/COVER/plugins/RhrClient: OpenCOVER remote hybrid rendering client plugin

Some documentation on Vistle is posted to vistle.io.