The Viewer is a stand-alone product that views HDF5 formatfiles (don'trecall revision level)

The Visualizer is an addon to Visual Studio that permits the debugger to examine arrays presented as charts and or graphs. The Visualizer I think requires the Viewer. One of the two (cann't recall which), includes an SDK and header files for direct use within an application. I wrote a 3D live data presentation for a finite element simulator.

Really cool things can be done with the Array Visualizer - sad to say it is not a supported product and has not had updates for years.

A few of the cool things you can do:

Fist the Viewer runs as a seperate process and works off of a database created by your application and minipulated as a memory mapped file. This provides for some rather unusual capabilities.

The responsibility of your application is to populate the database with raw data and the presentation infomation and then launch the Viewer (or launch Viewer first and watch viewer as application populates thedatabase). Once initialized, you application can continue to update the data and call to refresh the display. Ok, so what, you can do this with OpenGL and some of the other graphical presentation tools.

First, because the Viewer runs as a seperate process using a memory mapped file you are free to have the Viewer run on a seperate computer on the network. When you run compute intensive simulations, you can push the display overhead off to a different system (saving one or more hardware threads processing capacity for the number crunching). If your system has an integrated display adapter this may recover over 50% of the processing capability of your multi-core system.

The second thing that is cool is you can run multiple Viewers at the same time off the same data base. Ok, so what's so cool about looking at two pictures of the same presentation? Well you do not use this to look at two of the same images. What you do is look at two different presentations of either the same data set (portion of data written by your applicaiton) or two different data sets. Example: You might want multiple views of a 3D chart from different perspectives (each independently rotatable, panable, zoomable). Or you might want to see the chart on one screen and the data in tabular format on another screen.

The really coolest thing though is assuming you have the tabular data available to the Viewer, but were too lazy (busy) to write the code to insert the chart or graph informationinto the datbase, you can use the Viewer to add the new chart while your application is running and producing data. While you are making your presentation to your cusotmer or boss asks can I see... well, if the data is present in the database, you can add the chart without interrupting the presentation run.

Sad to say, Intel withdrew support of this software. I don't think they realy knew what they had, what they could do with it, or how to market it. Although most of the code was Open Source, the integratons into the compiler and runtime system enhanced the value of those products. BTW, it was that capability that drove my purchase decision to use Intel Visual Fortran.

Jim Dempsey