Happy Anniversary VisIt

VisIt is celebrating 20 years of service!

VisIt started with a visionary software architecture initially developed by Hank Childs in 1999.

The first release of VisIt was completed almost two years later involving about 750 thousand lines of code and 3,100 source files, 20 database plugins, 22 operator plugins and 12 plot plugins and a handful of unit and integration tests. Today, the code base comprises nearly 4.1 million lines of code and 10,500 source files, 139 database plugins, 73 operator plugins and 21 plot plugins and a test dashboard tracking status of 5,200 image, numerical and textual tests.

In addition to Hank, Eric Brugger, Kathleen Biagas (then Bonnell), Jeremy Meredith and Brad Whitlock formed the original development team. During the intervening 20 years, the team has grown to include many active contributors. Remarkably, Eric and Kathleen still lead development of VisIt today and Hank and Brad remain involved through external collaborations.

Throughout its lifetime, the VisIt project has benefited from and is grateful for the hard work of many other contributors through either development, sponsorship, collaboration or advocacy. In particular, we thank staff and leadership of the WCI program at LLNL for providing a majority of the funding and entrusting us to sustain the critical capabilities VisIt provides.

Finally, we thank our many dedicated users for your confidence in VisIt, your patience and help in diagnosing and fixing bugs, your suggestions for improvements, your willingness to try to build VisIt for a new platform or to roll up your sleeves and dig into the code, your sharing your data and results, your advocacy and citations of VisIt in presentations and papers, your ever more creative ways in using VisIt to perform an analysis and for your committment to making VisIt better.

Read more about VisIt’s history.