The ParaView code base is designed in such a way that all of its components can be reused to quickly develop vertical applications.

It has been successfully tested on Windows, macOS, Linux, IBM Blue Gene, Cray Xt3 and various Unix workstations, clusters and supercomputers.

Under the hood, ParaView uses Visualization Toolkit (VTK) as the data processing and rendering engine and has a user interface written using Qt.

This project was funded by Phase I and II SBIRs from the US Army Research Laboratory and eventually became the ParaView Enterprise Edition.

In September 2005, Kitware, Sandia National Labs and CSimSoft (now Coreform LLC) started the development of ParaView 3.0.