Illuminator

Adam Powell, Bo Zhou, Jorge Vieyra, Wanida Pongsaksawad, Ojonimi Ocholi

Last modified February 6, 2006


PETSc is a really powerful solver, and includes data management infrastructure for 2-D and 3-D finite difference simulations. But it does not support viewing of 3-D distributed arrays. Geomview is a really cool surface display program. So, why not link the two? That is, why not enable PETSc to construct the triangulation of a contour surface in parallel, then use Geomview to display that triangulation?

So here is my first cut, which does all of the above. A replacement for Geomview as a front end is currently under development which will push more rendering work out to the nodes. Further developments will allow for semi-transparent layering with non-strict ordering of the CPU data, such that *METIS-partitioned finite element data will be rendered properly.

As of version 0.4.0, Illuminator also includes functions for distributed storage and loading of data to/from local hard disks of Beowulf cluster nodes with outrageous bandwidth. This enables users to load and visualize data enormously faster than if it were all stored on the head node's disk(s); this feature is particularly useful for timestep series. 0.4.1 also has a general-purpose function graphing program called 3dgf which is perhaps the simplest demonstration of the use of illuminator.

Version 0.3.0 added chui, a libglade-based user interface for the demo chts, which will evolve into a demonstration of the power of, and a prototype for, fully interactive remote parallel computation and visualization. This is available to Debian illuminator-demo package users via the Debian menu under Applications | Graphics.

Download

If you run Debian, just type:
apt-get install illuminator-demo illuminator-doc
to get everything. You can also get old .debs here; as of August 18, 2004, 0.6.1-0.woody.1 is the latest built against woody (requires the latest woody backport of PETSc 2.1.5 available here), and 0.9.1-1sarge1 against sarge.

Otherwise, get PETSc, get Geomview, get libglade, build and install them all, then download Illuminator from the links below.

Illuminator is copyright 2001-2002 Adam Powell, copyright 2003-2004 Adam Powell Bo Zhou, Jorge Vieyra and Wanida Pongsaksawad, and may be used and distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Version 0.1 Signature Documentation
Version 0.2 Signature Documentation
Version 0.2.1 Signature Documentation
Version 0.2.2 Signature Documentation
Version 0.2.3 Signature Documentation
Version 0.2.4 Signature Documentation
Version 0.2.5 Signature Documentation
Version 0.3.0 Signature Documentation
Version 0.3.1 Signature Documentation
Version 0.3.2 Signature Documentation
Version 0.4.0 Signature Documentation
Version 0.4.1 Signature Documentation
Version 0.4.2 Signature Documentation
Version 0.4.3 Signature Documentation
Version 0.4.4 Signature Documentation
Version 0.5.0 Signature Documentation
Version 0.6.0 Signature Documentation
Version 0.6.1 Signature Documentation
Version 0.6.2 Signature Documentation
Version 0.6.9 Signature Documentation
Version 0.8.0 Signature Documentation
Version 0.8.9 Signature Documentation
Version 0.9.0 Signature Documentation
Version 0.9.1 Signature Documentation
Version 0.10.0 Signature Documentation

Screenshots

The Illuminator demonstration program chts (Cahn-Hilliard timestep, described in the documentation) with default Illuminator contours at 0.2, 0.4, 0.6 and 0.8 of the way between the minimum and maximum values of the field:

Adam Powell, GPG public key