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3Visualization ToolsIf I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.— Albert EinsteinIn this chapter we discuss the tools needed to visualize data produced by simulationsand measurements. Whereas other books may choose to relegate this discussion to anappendix, or not to include it at all, we believe that visualization is such an integralpart of computational science, and so useful for your work in the rest of this book, thatwe have placed it right here, up front. (We do, however, place our OpenDx tutorialin Appendix C since it may be a bit much for beginners.)All the visualization tools we discuss are powerful enough for professionalscientific work and are free or open source. Commercial packages such as Matlab,AVS, Amira, and Noesys produce excellent scientific visualization but are lesswidely available. Mathematica and Maple have excellent visualization packages aswell, but we have not found them convenient when dealing with large numericaldata sets. 1 The tools we discuss, and have used in preparing the visualizations forthe text, arePtPlot: Simple 2-D plotting callable from within a Java program, or as standaloneapplication; part of the Ptolemy package. Being Java, it is universal forall operating systems.Gnuplot: 2-D and 3-D plotting, predominantly stand-alone. Originally for Unixoperating systems, with an excellent windows port also available.Ace/gr (Grace): Stand-alone, menu-driven, publication-quality 2-D plotting forUnix systems; can run under MS Windows with Cygwin.OPenDX: Formerly IBM DataExplorer. Multidimensional data tool for Unix orfor Windows under Cygwin (tutorial in Appendix C).3.1 Data VisualizationOne of the most rewarding uses of computers is visualizing the results ofcalculations. While in the past this was done with 2-D plots, in modern times it1 Visualization with Maple and Mathematica is discussed in [L 05].−101COPYRIGHT 2008, PRINCET O N UNIVE R S I T Y P R E S SEVALUATION COPY ONLY. NOT FOR USE IN COURSES.ALLpup_06.04 — 2008/2/15 — Page 45