31 – Visualization in the SCIRun Problem-Solving Environment

Computer science and numerical methods is the emerging field of computational science. This chapter describes a general-purpose framework designed to assist scientists and engineers from a broad range of disciplines in investigating their respective computational science problems. As an infrastructure, the SCIRun computational problem-solving environment is a powerful collection of high-performance software libraries. These libraries provide many operating system- type services, such as memory and thread management and interthread communication and synchronization as well as development utilities such as geometry, container, scene-graph, and persistent I/O classes. This framework provides a broad range of tools at hand for modeling, simulating, visualizing, and iteratively exploring a problem space. Thus, the SCIRun user-level programming environment is a visual data-flow environment that facilitates rapid development as it is easy to use, extend, and customize.