Jaswant Panchumarti
Jaswant Panchumarti is an R&D engineer on Kitware’s Scientific Computing Team. He contributes to open source platforms like ParaView and VTK for 3D visualization across different platforms ranging from web browsers to supercomputers. Passionate about core graphics programming and WebAssembly, he strives to expand and simplify the capabilities of scientific data visualization.
Sessions
PyVista is a general purpose 3D visualization library used for over 2000+ open source projects for the visualization of everything from computer aided engineering and geophysics to volcanoes and digital artwork.
PyVista exposes a Pythonic API to the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) to provide tooling that is immediately usable without any prior knowledge of VTK and is being built as the 3D equivalent of Matplotlib, with plugins to Jupyter to enable visualization of 3D data using both server- and client-side rendering.
Visualizing large-scale simulation datasets is vital for research in scientific and engineering fields. To this end, VTK, an open-source C++ visualization library, and its Python counterparts VTK Python, PyVista and Vedo are streamlining 3D visualization, though shortcomings remain. We significantly improved VTK's automated wrappers and improved VTK WebAssembly thus simplifying creation of visualizations in Python or on the web using Trame. This also made it easier to execute VTK native code directly in a web browser. We discuss challenges and lessons learned in extending large C++ software to diverse languages through API wrapping and cross-compilation to ultimately benefit the Python community.