Illuminator is intended for developers who are familiar with PETSc and want to visualize distributed arrays, and as such, this manual assumes knowledge of PETSc programming.
With such knowledge, using Illuminator is pretty simple. Start by invoking GeomviewBegin() (appendix E.2.1) to open the Geomview display and the pipes to and from Geomview.
At an appropriate checkpoint in the program, invoke DATriangulate() (appendix F.1.1) to create the distributed triangulation on each processor. When that is complete, the function GeomviewDisplayTriangulation() (appendix E.2.2) gathers the triangulations to node 0, sends them to Geomview and resets the triangle counts to zero. This cycle of DATriangulate() and GeomviewDisplayTriangulation() may be repeated as necessary, subsequent cycles simply replace the existing triangle set in Geomview with a new set of triangles. In the example program chts, this is done in the function ch_ts_monitor() (appendix G.2.5) whose function pointer is passed to PETSc's TS_Set_Monitor() so it displays the contour surfaces at the end of every timestep calculation.
Finally, when you are done, call GeomviewEnd() (appendix E.2.3) to exit the Geomview process and close its pipes.
For more details, refer to the complete source code reference which begins at appendix C.