Search for Kitware Gives Back

In my last two blogs (1, 2), I introduced the vtkPythonAlgorithm and started demonstrating how it can be used to develop sources and algorithms in Python. In those articles, I touched on a few VTK pipeline concepts. For those are not familiar with VTK’s pipeline, this may have been somewhat hard to follow. So in […]

ParaView has a number of great filters for generating visualizations of 3D vector fields. This post describes a recipe I learned from Russell M Taylor II at UNC’s Department of Computer Science. The recipe combines several of ParaView’s filters to produce curved arrow glyphs that are laid end-to-end at a good density in the image, resulting in improved perception of […]

On March 28th, the 4th Open Source Festival at SUNY Albany, hosted a Workshop on OpenStack OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. […]

Motivation Observations unequivocally show that the global climate is changing, caused over the past 50 years primarily by human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. The dramatic effects of climate change include increases in water temperature, reduced frost days, a rise in sea level, and reduced snow cover. As the pace of climate change is expected to […]

One of the goals of the Open Chemistry project [1,2] at Kitware is to provide a simple, easy-to-use interface for submitting chemical simulations to be executed on high-performance computing (HPC) resources. To this end, we have developed MoleQueue — a system-tray resident server application that uses standard inter-process communication channels to interact with programs that […]

Index To the Series 1. Raspberery Pi likes Open Source 2. Cross-Compiling for Raspberry Pi 3. Cross-Compiling ITK for Raspberry Pi 4. Raspberry Pi likes VTK 5. Raspberry Pi likes Node.js   Following on our previous posts on using the Raspberry Pi, here we describe the process of Cross-Compiling ITK for the Raspberry Pi. In […]

Index To the Series 1. Raspberry Pi likes Open Source 2. Cross-Compiling for Raspberry Pi 3. Cross-Compiling ITK for Raspberry Pi 4. Raspberry Pi likes VTK 5. Raspberry Pi likes Node.js    Cross-Compiling for Raspberry Pi   Using a Dell Precision M6700 (Ubuntu 12.10) to build binaries for the Raspberry Pi This is a follow […]

The visualization capabilities offered by current tools for vision datasets are limited in many ways, hindering the ability of researchers to quickly inspect image and video data and verify algorithmic results. Therefore, we developed VisGUI; a novel, high-performance, extensible, and cross-platform framework, which offers various ways to visualize and analyze vision datasets in an effective […]

The cold Winter tradition of clinging to data and restricting access to information is now melting down and giving way to a warm Spring of information sharing. Here are some of the promising events with which we have started the Spring of 2012: The Research Works Act has been defeated (the Bad Act) The responsible […]

This year was the Visualization Toolkit’s first year as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organization. This is an exciting way for students to get involved in open source while being funded by Google to “flip bits not burgers.” Marcus Hanwell first took part in the Google Summer of Code program as a student […]

The Visualization Toolkit participated for the first time this year in the Google Summer of Code program as a mentoring organization. This program is an exciting way for students to get involved in open source while being funded by Google to “flip bits not burgers.” Marcus Hanwell, a former Google Summer of Code student participant, […]

Kitware has a track record for applying agile software development processes to our projects. Since each project is unique in its needs and workflow, the same processes are not used for every project. We use mainstream development models like SCRUM [1] , Kanban [2] , and even waterfall [3], but we typically adapt the process […]

Two of Kitware’s open source software packages were featured in a sequel book to O’Reilly’s “Beautiful Code”. In the new book “The Architecture of Open Source Applications” there are two chapters by Kitware authors: Berk Geveci and Will Schroeder wrote about VTK, and Bill Hoffman and Ken Martin wrote about CMake.  The book is meant […]

ITK Modularization in ITK 4.0 One of the major undertakings of the upcoming ITK 4.0 release is the modularization of ITK. Modularization is the process by which the many classes of ITK will be grouped into smaller and cohesive components. We will refer to those components as modules. This grouping will enable users to select […]

What is a computer? There was a time when it was easy to answer this question, a time when a computer was mostly a physical, or hardware, device (see Figure 1). It used to be that on top of that hardware device, a thin layer of logic was used to control the tasks performed by […]

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) has been accepted for the 2011 Google Summer of Code, with Kitware acting as the mentoring organization. This program encourages student participation in open source communities through three-month paid development projects. Students interested in the program apply to work on a specific project and work with a mentor at the organization […]

Imagine running a little program on your computer to volunteer your computing power to help keep your favorite open source project in tip-top shape. Extend that to a swarming cloud of volunteers running builds at your request and submitting results to your project’s dashboard. Soon, with the help of CTest and CDash, you’ll be able […]