MAVIS: an interactive visualization tool for computational chemistry calculations in a distributed networked environment.

This paper describes the software package, MAVIS (Molecular Animation and VI-sualization System), which was developed as a collaborative project between the University of Manchester Department of Chemistry and the Manchester Visualization Centre as a tool for the visualization of chemical systems and their properties and for the generation, submission, monitoring and study of results from calculations in a networked computing environment. MAVIS has been developed using AVS, a general visualization environment, as a suite of modules which can be extended with relative ease. Using the AVS system gives the application the power and flexibility of a general system with no requirement for the programmer to understand many of the complexities involved in modern image rendering systems and allowing them to concentrate upon the features of the functionality and the user interface. It also allows the code to be as portable between platforms as the AVS package itself and so it is available on a wide range of systems.