Telecon: 2026 07 20

2026/07/20 Meeting

Updates

• Ascent tutorial September 29th, 2026 9-11am PT as part of LLNL's HPC Tutorial Series

Recent Developments:

• Cyrus: Added static methods for simple python c api helpers
• Cyrus: Fixed type narrowing error in Dray
• Cyrus: Fixed to avoid PNG overflow for large images
• Cyrus: Numerous fixes to keep the CI healthy
  • Cuda builds running out of memory
  • Windows build being troublesome (when is it not?)
  • Moved (most of the) CI from azure to github actions
• Cyrus: Continuing to work on raytracing arbitrary rays
• Emily: Added warning if ascent.py exists in cwd
• Emily: Updated tutorial materials and build warnings
• Emily: Fixed infinite triggering loop for ascent_actions.yaml files
• Emily: Working on plotting with just one color
• Nicole: Added a Viskores patch for cell offset increments in clip worklet (this is solved in viskores 1.1.1)
• Nicole & Cyrus: Updated to use Viskores 1.1.1
• Nicole: Made a build script for the LLNL machine Matrix (NVIDIA GPUs)
• Nicole: Added option to sample a plane using normal, point, dims, and spacing
• Nicole & Cyrus: Merged in Viskores 1.2.0-rc2
• Nicole: Working on adding materials to field_filtering for Marbl & Axom
• Nicole: Working on adding topology as sampling input
• Nicole: Working on adding data adapter for structured strided data
• Meghanto: Adding scalar glyph types for point rendering
• Meghanto: Adding GLTF extract for surface meshes
• Meghanto: Also addding a revolve filter in Viskores that Ascent will be able to use

Discussion

• Discuss arbitrary rays with Ken (Viskores) -- specify specific set of rays rather than an auto-generated set of rays. Also want Float32 & Float64 (currently scalarRenderer only supports Float32) -- this might increase build times (templates/workelts etc); could be a compilation option. Ken thinks arbitrary rays should be fine, thought into how to specify rays and the interface. Can use raycaster directly, but it's more of an internal code -- not necessarily a stable interface for users. Original: Camera generates rays. Want: Users to generate rays. Hack(?): Make a weird custom camera that generates the rays you want.
• New in Viskores (1.2): ANARI upgrades to implementation -> Ascent + ANARI -> Viskores backend