We put the “I” back in TecIO

TecIO Read Capability A blog by Dr. Scott Imlay, Tecplot’s Chief Technical Officer “Good things come to those who wait!” – Guinness beer advertisement For many years, TecIO has been a library of utility functions that allow you to output Tecplot binary files directly from your application. There are two versions of TecIO, one for serial output, and one for MPI-based parallel output. The serial-output version can output either classic […]

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Tecplot SZL File Output from FUN3D

FUN3D version 13, released in September 2016, supports writing binary files in the new SZL format. I’ve written in previous blogs about the benefits of SZL technology for visualization of large data files. With SZL technology, common visualization tasks are up to two orders of magnitude faster and data files are compressed by up to 50%. This change offers additional benefits to FUN3D/Tecplot users, especially for those running in parallel on […]

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Employee Profile: Scott Imlay, Chief Technology Officer

Scott Imlay has a need for speed. As a competitive triathlete, he’s always trying to better his time from the previous race. And as Tecplot’s chief technology officer (CTO), he was the visionary behind SZL, the company’s proprietary technology that allows Tecplot 360 to render images nearly seven times faster than earlier versions of the software. This dramatic performance improvement is the result of faster data load & analysis times, […]

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The One Trillion Cell Challenge is Successfully Complete!

Trillion Cell Grand Challenge blog #8 was written by Dr. Scott Imlay, Chief Technical Officer. Craig Mackey, Senior Research Engineer, created the iso-surface. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that […]

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SZL Data Analysis – Making It Scale Sub-linearly!

Blog #6 in the Trillion Cell Grand Challenge, by Dr. Scott Imlay, Tecplot’s Chief Technical Officer Which came first, the chicken or the egg?—Aristotle In developing the technology to meet the Trillion Cell Challenge we struggled with the visualization version of this classic causality dilemma, and I finally have an answer! But first, a little background. Subzone Load-on-Demand (SZL) Technology As many of you know, Tecplot 360 utilizes a new […]

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Scaling to 300 Billion Cells – Results To Date

Blog #5 in the series The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge, written by Dr. Scott Imlay, Chief Technical Officer at Tecplot, Inc. “Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.” — Booker T. Washington In previous blogs, I’ve given the motivation for the Trillion Cell Challenge. In this blog I’d like to introduce the details of the challenge and give our results to date. Trillion-cell CFD Dataset At […]

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Intelligently Defeating the I/O Bottleneck

The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge blog #4 by Dr. Scott Imlay, CTO, Tecplot, Inc. Big whorls have little whorls That feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity. —Lewis F. Richardson This is a famous quote about the nature of turbulence: the energy in turbulence cascades down to smaller and smaller eddies until, at a certain length scale, the turbulence energy can be […]

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What Obstacles Stand Between Us and One Trillion Cells?

Blog #3 in the series The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge is about technology trends and the I/O bottleneck. Forecasting is very difficult, especially about the future. —Old Danish Proverb In previous blogs I’ve introduced the Trillion Cell Challenge and given the motivation for why it is a worthy goal. Now I’d like to start discussing the technical obstacles involved in visualizing a solution with one trillion cells. Basic Visualization Pipeline […]

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