Facilities for Scientific Visualization

Visualization software has evolved over a period of time and three distinct categories can be identified which appeared in succession. In general the older the category the less the power, memory and storage required to run them. This makes the software in the first category suitable for use in PC or terminal-mainframe environments, and the most recent developments only suitable for the most modern supercomputers or supercomputer workstations. At the same time, because the first and second categories have been around longer, more applications have been developed using them and many products in the market fall into these classes. It is likely in the future that tools using the most modern techniques will appear, but at the present time these techniques are very much in the experimental and developmental stage and will need some time to mature.