NASA Awards SBIR Funding To Kitware to Enhance Its Paraview Visualization Application

Kitware, the nation’s fastest growing software company and a leading patron of open source software research and development recently announced the winning of a major NASA funding. 

Scientific computing is supported by huge database, but the real challenge lies in analyzing and obtaining insight from the data. Scientists often run batch jobs to perform visualization, but this is not adequate for scientific discoveries

NASA, which seeks to address this challenge through an advanced visualization software, awarded SBIR funding to Kitware for developing the software. Kitware is going to implement the project in collaboration with California-based SciberQuest.

The software will enable NASA scientists to investigate their huge data sets in real time. This will ease up addressing critical issues in ultrascale visualization. The software will be utilizing massive distributed memory architectures with up to 100,000 cores to make it happen, kitware officials explained in a press release.

SciberQuest is a key player in the field of kinetic modeling of space plasmas. Through the partnership with SciberQuest, Kitware will gain access to the company’s real world data from petascale simulations. These are directly relevant to NASA's missions and scientific goals, and thus will allow Kiware to keep with the requirements of the ultimate user of the software through the development stage.

NASA currently uses ParaView, an open-source visualization application for exploring the results of trillion element particle simulations on the Pleiades supercomputer. At the initial stage, Kitware will be identifying scaling bottlenecks in this application. According to Kitware, the major issues at this stage are likely to relate to data IO, architectural overhead, and how to composite of the partial results. Thus on the whole, the Phase I functions of this project is likely to be limited to developing prototypes and selecting a solution, the company explained.

“By customizing ParaView for use in different environments, we are able to accommodate a broad range of users, including NASA. As datasets dramatically increase, it's great to collaborate with an organization like NASA that requires facilitating large dataset computation and scientific collaboration in nearly every facet of its research,” Utkarsh Ayachit, technical leader at Kitware, explained in the release.

Last month, Kitware announced an expansion in its research and development and support teams. This was reflective of the company’s continued success through the past five years, with revenue increasing from $5.6 million in 2005 to over $15 million in 2010.