VTK/ARB Notes/July 2015

July 9, 2015

Notes:

1. Remote modules (Lorensen)
   1. generally how to increase community engagement
   2. description of remotes mechanism which is the simple insertion of a file in the Remotes subdirectory which specifies location and git tag. The build process pulls down the repository and builds ir. An adaptation of ITK's approach.
2. Works in progress / Cool new features
   1. VTK-m description by Ken Moreland: efficient support for many- multi-core devices and libraries.
   2. Zero-Copy, data model updates (Geveci) to reduce memory costs and couple with simulation and other external data structures.
   3. Python 3.0 support (Gobbi, others) which is being worked on now. David will focus on v3.2 to take advantage of new VTK features.
   4. VTK Maintenance - OpenGL2 and interaction efforts (Geveci,Schroeder). Need to go beyond the basic VTK rendering architecture and extend it towards extensible OpenGL support.
   5. Parallel efforts (vtkSMPTools, OpenMP, etc) (Schroeder,Geveci)
3. Release schedule
   1. Philosophical arguments: Backward compatibility & aggressive release schedule
   2. v6.3 - next 1-2 weeks
   3. v7.0 - about a month after v6.3
   4. v8.0