Extended Visual Programming for Complex Parallel Pipelines in ParaView

Abstract

Modern visualization software facilitates the creation of visualization pipelines combining a plethora of algorithms to achieve high-fidelity visualization. When the complexity of the pipelines to be created increases, additional techniques are needed to ensure that reasoning about the pipelines structure and its performance remains feasible. This paper presents three additions to ParaView with the goal of improving presentation of complex, parallel pipelines benefiting pipeline realization. More specifically, we provide a runtime performance annotation visualization integrated in a visual programming node editor, allowing all users to reason about basic performance and intuitively manipulate the structure and configuration of pipelines. Further, we extend the list of available filters with control flow filters, supporting for- and while-loops with a comprehensible representation in the node editor. Our extension is based on graphical manipulation of a node graph that expresses the flow of data and computation in a VTK pipeline, and draws upon a long tradition and positive experience with similar interfaces across a wide range of software systems such as the visualization tools SCIRun and VTK Designer, or the rendering systems Blender and Houdini. The extension we provide integrates seamlessly into the existing ParaView architecture as a plug-in, i.e., it does not require any modifications to ParaView itself or VTK's execution model.