	SSP Project Summary:

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DIVE: Distributed Interface to Visualization Environment

The aim of this project is to provide users of parallel (MIMD) systems and the Cray-T3D in particular with an easy mechanism of visualizing the results of their parallel calculations. This mechanism will consist of an Application Program Interface (API) that is non-intrusive to the existing simulation code yet easy to use. A comprehensive set of standard visualization techniques will be provided for a certain class of regular data distributions but the interface will have the flexibility to allow the user to handle other cases of data distribution as well.

The distributed interface will build on an existing visualization library called AVSI (AVS Interface routines) which enables the on-line use of AVS (Advanced Visualization System) functionality from within application programs. The main functionality of the interface is to transport data from the parallel system to the visualization system in a scalable fashion with regards to memory usage. This means that if for example the distributed dataset occupies 16Mb of memory, the memory requirement on each of the N individual nodes of the parallel system would be one Nth of 16Mb. Of course the visualization system must have enough memory to hold the complete dataset.

In order to maintain portability, all communication within the distributed interface on the parallel system will use MPI (Message Passing Interface).

The main thrust of the project will be to provide efficient parallel algorithms/synchronisation mechanism to transport the data to be visualized from the parallel machine to the visualization workstation.

Expertise Required

Knowledge of C and Fortran is required. Experience with using AVS would be advantageous. This project would best suit a technically-oriented Computer Science student.

Resources Required

Target machine is the T3D although other parallel systems would be suitable for initial development. Disk space for the source code is 2Mb but at least 50Mb needs to be available when testing on large data-sets. Access to the Indigo-2 High Impact machine with FDDI connection to the T3D are required.

Resources Supplied

The project will build on the AVSI library for which public domain source and documentation, as well as example applications are already available.

Balint Joo worked on this project.

Compressed PostScript of the project's final report is available here (744 kbytes) .

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