VisIt

Installing VisIt 1.11.1

These are notes from Rupert Gladstone, modified by Gethin Williams.

Note that (like ChomboVis) VisIt is not at all friendly over a remote connection (such as SSH with Exceed, for example). These notes are for installing VisIt directly on your Linux machine.

Additional build notes are available at https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/1.11.1/BUILD_NOTES. However, these describe a manual build of all the dependencies, which will be far more tedius and error-prone than using the build script, described below.

1. Create the directory in which you wish to install VisIt, and cd to this directory. For example, on dartagnan, this dir is /opt/visit.

2. Download the VisIt 1.11.1 sources:

wget https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/1.11.1/visit1.11.1.tar.gz

3. Download the build script and save as build_visit.

4. There is a list of required 3rd party software in the Setup section of build_visit. Download all the 'must have' tarballs and also HDF5, NetCDF, szip. These can be downloaded from the bottom of the downloads page:

wget https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/3rd_party/qt-x11-free-3.3.8.tar.gz
wget https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/3rd_party/Mesa-5.0-mangled.tar.gz
wget https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/3rd_party/Python-2.5.tgz
wget https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/3rd_party/vtk-5.0.0c.tar.gz
wget https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/3rd_party/cmake-2.4.5.tar.gz
wget https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/3rd_party/silo-4.6.2.tar.gz
wget https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/3rd_party/hdf5-1.8.1.tar.gz
wget https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/3rd_party/netcdf.tar.gz
wget https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/3rd_party/szip-2.1.tar.gz

5. (optional) If you want to use an existing installation of the 3rd party software (note that that in some cases VisIt requires older versions) you can force this with this hack (uses Python as an example).

6. Run the build VisIt script.

Further notes:

I also had to download Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz from here, prompted by a message in the build log:

wget http://effbot.org/downloads/Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz

Note that this should give a valid install of VisIt, but VisIt will still not function properly when used remotely via ssh/exceed. This is because exceed does not support openGL. See also this Linux forum comment and the exceed website for more info. It would appear that exceed3d could be purchased to get round this problem.