Preface

This User Guide is a complete restructuration of a previous document titled VIGIE User Manual. This previous document was written in 1994 by Wihem Kherrati and myself (with the help of some users), and only the description of new recognized formats has been added in this original document. A lot of new features in the software are not described and it's time, now, to write a new, up to date VIGIE User Guide.

The softare VIGIE is issued from several students stages starting in 1992. The idea of the first one [1] was to construct the surface followed in the space by a ribbon in a fluid, submitted to a flow. An other one [2], the same summer, was to construct interactive tools for the visualisation of 3D volume meshes and plan cuts of these volumes an their boundaries.

After this summer 1992, I worked with two other students to compute and visualize isosurfaces [3], and just after that, we started, with Wihem Kherrati a new study [4] and a new software including all the separately developped tools. This was the first version of VIGIE, in September 1993.

In 93, for the European Hypersonic Data Base (EHDB) Workshop at Antibes, the idea to develop a visualization tool, workshop oriented, started. Remy Abgrall defined for this purpose a general data format for numerical results, still in use with the name ``HDB'' (page ).

In October 1993, this first version of VIGIE was used as a tool suport for the workshop on Approximations and Numerical Methods for the solution of the Maxwell Equations, at the George Washington University.

In 1994, we tried,Wihem Kherrati and myself, to have a more open view of algorithms used for visualisation of 3D numerical data. This work was concluded in 1995 by the publication of a research report [5].

Two other student stages, in summer 1994 [6] and 1995 [7] allowed to include in a new library the procedures used for localisation and interpolation [8].

One of the most interesting feature of the VIGIE software - the possibility to visualize and interact simulteously with several solutions of the same problem - has been initialized in 1994 with the advise of Jean-Antoine Désideri.

This feature allowed to use VIGIE as a workshop tool for:

• the European High Velocity Data Base Workshop (EHVDB), in 94, at ESA/ESTEC, Noordwijk, Holland.
• two ECARP Data Base Workshops (Optimun Design and MPP for NS flow) in July 1995, at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France.
• the 2nd International Workshop on the Numerical Solution of Maxwell's Equations. in November 1995, at the Oxford University Laboratory, U.K.
• the First US-Europe High Speed Flow Field Workshop also in November 1995, at the University of Houston, USA.
• a Liapounov Workshop at Moscow in 96.

In summer 1995, I worked with my son, Luc Fournier [9], to implement a simple numerical solver running on a cluster of workstations, using a PVM [10] implementation, with dynamic visualisation of numerical data, by some extensions in the VIGIE software [11].

These extensions allow the user of VIGIE to interact with visualized data, in usual way, while the PVM task running VIGIE received data from other PVM tasks.

I thank all the contributors to this development mentioned here and also the local users, from the project SINUS, who helped me by defining their needs and were wery patient with the use of an unfinished product.