Release Notes for VisIt 3.1.4

Welcome to VisIt’s release notes page. This page describes the important enhancements and bug-fixes that were added to this release.

  1. Bugs fixed in version 3.1.4
  2. Enhancements in version 3.1.4
  3. Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.1.4

Bugs fixed in version 3.1.4

  • Fixed a bug that resulted in domain boundaries being visible when using the OSPRay volume renderer.
  • Fixed the display of -help text on Windows.
  • Fixed a bug that caused incorrect opacity attenuation when ray casting datasets within very large or very small ranges.
  • Fixed a bug with the Hohlraum Flux query, where a ray would not be traced properly resulting in a compute engine crash. Those cases are now detected and the ray is ignored. Since this happens in extremely rare situations, this does not have a significant effect on the result.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented Pick over time from working with expressions that relied on mesh information.
  • Fixed a bug with the launcher script where the bank was not passed when launching with srun.
  • Modified the startup script to remove the code that unsetenv LD_PRELOAD since it was causing VisIt to fail at sites that were using LD_PRELOAD for VisIt to work properly. If you need to unsetenv LD_PRELOAD, it should be done in the custom launcher script, an example of which can be found in the LLNL customlauncher.
  • Fixed a bug with conn_cmfe expressions mapping between point meshes and polyhedral meshes that caused plotting failures with point data from files generated by Spheral. In particular, creating a Vector plot of “POINTS/velocity” failed. Creating a Pseudocolor plot of a point variable when scaling the points by another variable also failed, such as when displaying “POINTS/mass_density” and scaling the points by “POINTS/hmin”.
  • Fixed a bug where applying Log scaling to the view of a Curve plot (or lineout curve) yielded wrong results.
  • Fixed a bug with the variable menu not being sorted properly when the variable list had mixed-case names and variable grouping was used.
  • Fixed a bug with the conn_cmfe expression where mapping a variable from a polyhedral mesh to a point mesh failed when the mesh was material selected.
  • Fixed bug (5067) causing Curve plots with the “Curve color” set to “Cycle” to change their color as the timestep is advanced and a similar issue with the Mesh plot when the “Mesh color” or “Opaque color” is set to “Random”.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the default volume renderer from correctly applying opacity attenuation to datasets that exist in extreme extent ranges.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented Pick over time from working correctly when running VisIt in parallel.
  • Fixed a bug with specifying -cli and -o “somefile* database”,FORMAT from the command line.
  • Fixed a bug with the calculating of the data extents after calculating an expression that could result in the minimum being incorrectly set to zero when the minumum was greater than zero and the data was material selected.
  • Removed the misleading “Interrupt” button from the Compute Engine window.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the GUI orientation from resetting back to vertical when changing from a custom appearance to the default appearance.

Enhancements in version 3.1.4

  • Enabled the paraDIS and paraDIS_tecplot readers on Windows.
  • It is now possible to easily run VisIt in parallel with all the Linux distributions. To run in parallel, simply pass the number of processors to use with the “-np” command line option. For example, “visit -np 4” to run on 4 processors.
  • Removed the host profiles for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Max, Sequoia and Shark systems.
  • Enhanced the PLOT3D reader so that it can now process iblanking data. Users can specify if there is iblanking data in the file and whether or not to process it.
  • Added documentation for the “XRay Image” query to the Query section of the Quantitative Analysis chapter in the GUI Manual.
  • Updated the host profiles for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Tron, Zin and Zindev systems to use SSH tunneling.
  • Enhanced the Pick over time so that it uses a much faster route when picking verdict metric variables.

Changes for VisIt developers in version 3.1.4

  • Updated build_visit for macOS 10.15.
  • Removed FastBit and FastQuery from VisIt.
  • Added notarization capability to the masonry macOS build scripts.
  • Updated a version comparison function in build_visit so that it worked on Manjaro Linux, an Arch Linux derivative.