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Climate science is hot right now, and not just because it's summer! Some of our fellow Kitwareans have been working on a software tool that will give non-researchers access to world-class climate data.
This summer we've also been busy putting out new software releases, preparing for our upcoming fall training opportunities, and getting together for some summer fun. There were new releases for CMake and ITK in July that introduced new features and enhancements. We began dusting off our teaching hats for our new courses this fall, including on-site courses and new online offerings. We also released the new ParaView Guide eBook, which is available on our website. Lastly, but certainly not least, we took a break to slow down a little and get to know some four-legged friends better at the Schauber Stables.
- The Kitware Communications Team
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New Fall Courses Announced
New on-site and online courses open for registration!
In July, we announced updates to our training repertoire. We are offering three new on-site courses this Fall: VTK for Developers, ParaView for End-Users, and CMake and Friends. Each of these is a day-long course taught by one of our expert instructors and features hands-on exercises. Held at Kitware's headquarters in Clifton Park, NY, the courses will give participants an opportunity to pick the brains of some of the key contributors to the toolkits and sharpen their skills to better leverage the tools in their work.
In addition to the on-site courses, we are also hosting new online introductory courses. We've added courses for the Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK), Midas, and Slicer into our free, online rotation. These courses provide a foundation and a deeper understanding of the software, preparing participants to leverage the tools for their own work.
For more information, including specific course objectives and registration information, please visit our training page. If you are interested in a custom course, please contact us at [email protected].
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ITK 4.2.0 Released
Compiler Support and Infrastructure ImprovementsThe ITK 4.2.0 release was announced in July, and features improvements to compiler support and infrastructure. These changes addressed challenges with several compilers, including GCC 4.7.0 and Visual Studio 10, and new GPU modules were added for finite difference, smoothing, thresholding, and registration. The team also added infrastructure to support remote modules and a new physics-based, non-rigid registration technique. There are other V4 enhancements in the 4.2.0 release that can be viewed in the change log.Additionally, this release welcomed five new contributors with merged patches: Dave Chen, Marc Bruce, Michael Jeulin-L, Ren-Hui Gong, and T.R. Shashwath. There are numerous ways for you to get involved as part of the ITK community, including joining the mailing lists, contributing to the wiki, writing an Insight Journal article, or reviewing and submitting patches on Gerrit.
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Horsing Around with Kitware
Kitwareans Visit Schauber Stables
Kitwareans and their families recently took a trip to Schauber Stables in upstate New York. The fun-filled day involved lots of hands-on entertainment, from making our own horse treats to doing arts and crafts. We were able to get up close and personal with the animals, including several goats, a mini-donkey, pot bellied pigs, and of course the horses. After getting to know the animals a bit, and winning the horses over with our handmade treats, we went for a trail ride through the stable grounds. With so much activity, we worked up an appetite and celebrated with a pizza party for all. You can see some great pictures of the event on our blog, including a "hand-painted" horse in Kitware colors!
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Making Climate Data Accessible
ClimatePipes Brings Climate Data to a Broad Audience
Kitware has been working on ClimatePipes, a web-based tool that enables users to access, query and visualize climate datasets from multiple sources. The goal of the project is to provide simple, intuitive, and effective workflows that can be used by non-researchers and non-programmers. It builds on top of existing high-end tools, and is designed to easily leverage functionality added to those tools, thus ensuring state-of-the-art functionality in the years to come.
With the pace of climate change expected to accelerate, the impact of these changes will resonate through a broad range of fields including public health, infrastructure, water resources, and many others. It is for stakeholders in these fields that ClimatePipes will play a critical role and enable a broader audience to participate in the policy and decision making processes.
We recently presented our work to a variety of stakeholders, including individuals in the climate research community and non-climate researchers, and received good feedback. You can see the details in a recent blog post, including ClimatePipes workflow and simulation images.
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CMake 2.8.9 Now Available
Ninja Generator Support Enables Faster Builds
CMake 2.8.9 is now available after three exciting release candidates! Notable updates in this release include a default-enabled Ninja generator, a new position-independent code target property and MUMPS coverage support. The Ninja generator is a replacement for Make, and uses all cores in a machine to enable faster builds by maximizing the ability to parallelize the build code. This is now enabled by default on Linux, Mac, and Windows. To see how this is leveraged for a dashboard machine, you can look at our CMake dashboard scripts.
The position-independent code target property automatically adds -fPIC and -fPIE compiler flags for compilers that require it when building static libraries, which makes it easy to avoid adding platform specifics to your CMakeLists. Lastly, the MUMPS programming language now has coverage tools, with added support in CTest to include GTM and Cache. This is already in use by the OSEHRA community.
More details on the updates in CMake 2.8.9 are available in the change log, and the binaries are available on the download page.
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