Introduction

The Titan Informatics Toolkit is a collaborative effort between Sandia National Laboratories and Kitware Inc. Titan provides a flexible, component-based pipeline architecture for ingestion, processing, and display of informatics data, and integrates its capabilities with a series of best-in-class open-source toolkits for scientific visualization (VTK), graph algorithms (Boost Graph Library), linear algebra (Trilinos), and more. Thus, Titan is one of the first software development efforts to address the merging of scientific visualization and information visualization on a substantive level, and Titan provides an excellent framework for doing scalable analysis on distributed memory platforms.

Titan components may be used by application developers using their native C++ API on all popular platforms, or using any of a broad set of language bindings that include Python, Java, TCL, and more. As shown in Figures 1 and 2, applications are built by combining Titan components to address problems in a specific domain.

Figure 1: An example application built from Titan/VTK components. The flexibility of the pipeline architecture allows effective utilization of the Titan components for different problem domains.

Figure 2: Cell lineage application. The tree represents the development of a c. elegans embryo from a single cell. The green circle in the tree view represents a stage of the development, which is linked a volume rendering of the embryo at that time. Cells selected in the tree views are also linked to gene expression data. Proceedings of SPIE Visualization and Data Analysis (VDA 2008), San Jose, CA, 2008.

Getting Started

You can download a binary installer that works with Windows XP SP3, Windows 7 32-bit, and Windows 7 64-bit. The installer includes the Titan libraries, header files, a copy of Python 2.6, and several other useful tools.

For other platforms (Mac OSX, Linux), the Titan source code is available under a new-BSD license, and is available for immediate download - see the Titan Reference Documentation for download and build details:

• Titan Reference Documentation - including installation guide, technology overviews, API reference, and licensing information.

The following resources are open to all Titan users and developers:

• Titan Software Quality Dashboard - aggregating the results of nightly regression tests from clients around the world.
• titan-users@public.kitware.com (Sign up here) - mailing list for announcements, questions, bug reports, feature requets.
• titan-developers@public.kitware.com (Sign up here) - mailing list for technical announcements, general development, design discussions, technical feedback.
• Titan Wiki - collaborative wiki environment that is open for editing by all users.

Internal resources are also available for Sandia employees:

• titan-help@sandia.gov - direct Sandia support mailing list.

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