PMVIS (Partitioned Mesh Visualizer),
A Program to view partitioned meshes

Introduction

PMVIS (Partitioned Mesh Visualizer) is a program to view partitioned, unstructured meshes, consisting of triangular, quadrilateral, tetrahedral, or hexahedral elements. Partitioned meshes are commonly used in high performance computing to distribute the computation into a number of processors. PMVIS is developed to view these meshes, allowing users to examine partitions by means of explosion, zooming, rotation, translation, scaling, and applying a clipping cube.

Updates

2009-02-22 License changed to GPL3. Source code updated to latest ISO C++ specs.
2001-04-11 Fixed a few compatibility issues.
2001-04-20 Version 1.07 is up, original partition order is preserved.
2001-03-16 PMVIS home page is moved to this location.
2001-01-20 Online manual in html format is available.
2000-04-29 Modified source code to handle scope changes in ANSI C++.
1999-11-28 PMVIS is online and it is submitted to opengl.org.

Features

High performance, portable program using OpenGL hardware acceleration
Support up to thousands of partitions, millions of elements
Support for triangles, quadrilaterals, tetrahedrons, and hexahedrons
Easy to use user-interface using mouse and keyboard
Optional preprocessing to remove nonboundary elements, increasing performance and memory usage
Optional, on the fly sorting of partition centers to improve transparency effects
Different levels of anti-aliasing balancing speed and quality
Optional backface or frontface culling
Ability to zoom, rotate, translate, scale and move clipping cube
Autoselection of distant colors for a given number of partitions
Selecting subsets of partitions, ability to hide or apply different transparency values for each
Adjustable explosion factor to separate partitions
Ability to use a clipping cube with adjustable position and size to focus on a subvolume
Optional preview mode to obtain better interactivity with larger meshes
Bounding boxes and partition labels drawn in preview mode to locate relative position of partitions
Optional interface to METIS to partition the mesh on the fly for a given number of partitions

PMVIS is pretty flexible in various aspects and does not necessarily require a partitioned mesh. If no partition vector is given, the mesh is treated as a single partition and can be used with full functionality.

Platforms

PMVIS is written in C++ using OpenGL and GLUT libraries. It is quite portable and should work on various platforms such as various flavors of Unix, Windows, OS/2, and MacOS. It is tested for SGI Iris 6.2, Windows 98/NT, and GNU/Linux.

For more information on OpenGL and GLUT see http://www.opengl.org/