Trame: Platform Ubiquitous, Scalable Integration Framework for Visual Analytics

Keywords

Scientific computing, Visual analytics, Computer architecture, Licenses, Libraries, Servers, Security, Software tools, Standards, Open source software

Abstract

Trame is an open-source, Python-based, scalable integration framework for visual analytics. It is the culmination of decades of work—by a large and active community—beginning with the creation of VTK, the growth of ParaView as a premier high-performance, client–server computing system, and more recently the creation of web tools, such as VTK.js and VTK.wasm. As an integration environment, trame relies on open-source standards and tools that can be easily combined into effective computing solutions. We have long recognized that impactful analytics tools must be ubiquitous—meaning they run on all major computing platforms—and integrate/interoperate easily with external packages, such as data systems and processing tools, application UI frameworks, and 2-D/3-D graphical libraries. In this article, we present the architecture and use of trame for applications ranging from simple dashboards to complex workflow-based applications. We also describe examples that readily incorporate external tools and run without coding changes on desktop, mobile, cloud, client–server, and interactive computing notebooks, such as Jupyter.