VTK 6.1.0 Ready for Release

Kitware and the entire VTK team are happy to announce that VTK 6.1.0 is ready for release. VTK 6.1.0 fixes bugs and adds features on top of the more modular code structure of version 6.0. The source, data, and new vtkpython binary packages can be downloaded from VTK’s website.

VTK continues to evolve to make use of the parallelism available in modern architectures. In this release, the vtkDax accelerator module and vtkSMP multithreaded filters are introduced. The Dax interface allows VTK to offload work to Sandia’s Dax framework for GPGPU and multi-core data processing. In addition, Inria’s vtkSMP brings a framework for fine-grained work-stealing parallel processing inside of unstructured data processing filters.

Also in this release, VTK takes a giant leap onto the web processing frontier. ParaView’s core web interface and widget components have been promoted to VTK, and new features have been added such as an integrated, object-oriented python framework for writing dashboard tests of web applications, a simple python-based launcher and file upload server, and a viewport that drives the VGL (webgl-based) rendering library developed by Kitware and NYU.

Beginning with this release, Kitware will be publishing runnable binaries of VTK’s python shell interface for Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems, along with the usual source, data, and documentation packages. These replace and improve upon the old vtk-tcl.exe windows-only package.