Viskores is a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for emerging processor architectures. Viskores supports the fine-grained concurrency for data analysis and visualization algorithms required to drive extreme scale computing by providing abstract models for data and execution that can be applied to a variety of algorithms across many different processor architectures.
See the technical charter and governance document for the structure of the project.
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A high-level overview is given in the IEEE Vis talk "Viskores: Accelerating the Visualization Toolkit for Massively Threaded Architectures."
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The Viskores Users Guide provides extensive documentation. It is broken into multiple parts for learning and references at multiple different levels.
- "Part 1: Getting Started" provides the introductory instruction for building Viskores and using its high-level features.
- "Part 2: Using Viskores" covers the core fundamental components of Viskores including data model, worklets, and filters.
- "Part 3: Developing with Viskores" covers how to develop new worklets and filters.
- "Part 4: Advanced Development" covers topics such as new worklet types and custom device adapters.
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A practical Viskores Tutorial based in what users want to accomplish with Viskores:
- Building Viskores and using existing Viskores data structures and filters.
- Algorithm development with Viskores.
- Writing new Viskores filters.
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Community discussion takes place on the Viskores users discussion.
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Doxygen-generated reference documentation is available for the tip of the release branch at Viskores Doxygen latest
There are many ways to contribute to Viskores, with varying levels of effort.
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Ask a question on the Viskores users discussion.
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Submit new or add to discussions of a feature requests or bugs on the Viskores Issue Tracker.
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Submit a Pull Request to improve Viskores
- See CONTRIBUTING.md for detailed instructions on how to create a Pull Request.
- See the Viskores Coding Conventions that must be followed for contributed code.
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Submit an Issue or Pull Request for the Viskores Users Guide
See the CONTRIBUTING.md for more ways to contribute and instructions.
Viskores Requires:
- C++17 Compiler. Viskores has been confirmed to work with the following
- GCC 8.5+
- Clang 6.0+
- XCode 16.2+
- MSVC 2019+
- Intel oneAPI 2025+
- CMake
- CMake 3.15+
- CMake 3.24+ (for ROCM+THRUST support)
Optional dependencies are:
- Kokkos Device Adapter
- Kokkos 3.7+
- CXX env variable or CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER should be set to hipcc when using Kokkos device adapter with HIP (ROCM>=6).
- CUDA Device Adapter
- Cuda Toolkit 9.2, >= 10.2
- Note CUDA >= 10.2 is required on Windows
- TBB Device Adapter
- OpenMP Device Adapter
- Requires a compiler that supports OpenMP >= 4.0.
- OpenGL Rendering
- The rendering module contains multiple rendering implementations including standalone rendering code. The rendering module also includes (optionally built) OpenGL rendering classes.
- The OpenGL rendering classes require 8000 that you have a extension binding library and one rendering library. A windowing library is not needed except for some optional tests.
- Extension Binding
- On Screen Rendering
- OpenGL Driver
- Mesa Driver
- On Screen Rendering Tests
- Headless Rendering
- OS Mesa
- EGL Driver
Viskores has been tested on the following configurations:c
- On Linux
- GCC 5.4.0, 5.4, 6.5, 7.4, 8.2, 9.2; Clang 5, 8; Intel 17.0.4; 19.0.0
- CMake 3.12, 3.13, 3.16, 3.17
- CUDA 9.2, 10.2, 11.0, 11.1
- TBB 4.4 U2, 2017 U7
- On Windows
- Visual Studio 2015, 2017
- CMake 3.12, 3.17
- CUDA 10.2
- TBB 2017 U3, 2018 U2
- On MacOS
- AppleClang 9.1
- CMake 3.12
- TBB 2018
Viskores supports all major platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX), and uses CMake to generate all the build rules for the project. The Viskores source code is available from the Viskores download page or by directly cloning the Viskores git repository.
The basic procedure for building Viskores is to unpack the source, create a build directory, run CMake in that build directory (pointing to the source) and then build. Here are some example *nix commands for the process (individual commands may vary).
$ tar xvzf ~/Downloads/viskores-v2.0.0.tar.gz
$ mkdir viskores-build
$ cd viskores-build
$ cmake-gui ../viskores-v2.0.0
$ cmake --build -j . # Runs make (or other build program)A more detailed description of building Viskores is available in the Viskores Users Guide.
The Viskores source distribution includes a number of examples. The goal of the Viskores examples is to illustrate specific Viskores concepts in a consistent and simple format. However, these examples cover only a small portion of the capabilities of Viskores.
A simple starting example is Demo.cxx, which can be found in the examples/demo directory. It also comes with a sample CMakeLists.txt for configuring such a project. When learning to create your own code, both the Viskores Tutorial and Viskores Users Guide have many examples to get you started.
Viskores is distributed under the OSI-approved BSD 3-clause License. See LICENSE.txt for details.