VTK-m has been renamed “Viskores”. This name change coincides with the project being accepted into the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) under the Linux Foundation. This is an exciting development and will bring VTK-m, now Viskores, into a much larger community of projects. With this change, VTK is updating the core implementation details of the VTK-m filters in VTK to use the newly namespaces Viskores. The version of Viskores being used is now v1.0.0, which maps with full feature parity to the last VTK-m release v2.3.0, meaning that no functionality has been lost in this transition.
Even though the VTKm filters will be using Viskores as the core library, the names of the VTK-m filters will not change to allow for a seamless API transition for VTK users. These APIs may be deprecated in the future with new Viskores names but there is currently no plan to do so.
The VTK-m wrapper module for VTK-m will be removed and replaced with a Viskores module. For projects using the old VTK-m module a configure error will be raised. An additional update to how Viskores is vendored is it has been converted from a submodule to a snapshot like the other third party libraries. It is also now possible to point at an external Viskores library, allowing for better reuse of already existing builds of the Viskores libraries.
This change is intended to allow VTK to continue to track the latest developments in accelerated filters and provide the best performance possible from the accelerator module filters.