Distributed Virtual Reality Experiments
In art, science and industry communities alike, there is a rapidly growing
need for 3D visualization. Three-dimensional simulations make it possible
to test future products, or to investigate otherwise unreachable
environments. At KTH, the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 has been modeled as
an educational exercise in the architecture department. At NCSA, a CAVE is
used by George Francis to teach mathematics. Virtual Reality (VR) can be
also be used in city planning, giving the opportunity to walk around in a
city that has not yet been built.
A number of projects that use the Center for Parallel Computers (PDC)
Cube--a fully immersive visualization environment that displays images on
all surrounding surfaces, including the floor and the ceilinghave been
initiated. These include science-oriented applications (e.g. analysis of
glacier flows, volume rendering of biological data, flows in a jet engine,
and visualization of computational fluid dynamics), and applications from
other fields, such as architecture. Part of its design philosophy is to
integrate new resources into an existing infrastructure. At PDC there are
no stand-alone systems, but rather a collection of various integrated
systems that improve over time. User accounts, file systems, storage
facilities, and security systems have been distributed among the different
computing resources for several years. The Cube is integrated in the same
way and is therefore directly accessible to any PDC user with a suitable
project.
The PDC bulk data transfer network is HiPPI-800 between most of the larger
systems, including the SGI Onyx2 driving the Cube. Apart from HiPPI,
internal networking topology consists of a mixture of 100Mb FDDI and
FastEthernet. External connections are excellent, since PDC is directly
connected by fiber to KTHNOC, where the main interconnect for both SUNET
(Swedish University Network) and NORDUnet (Nordic University Network) is
located. Even apart from academic networks, KTHNOC is one of the largest
interconnects on the Internet today.
Collaborators
Parallel Computing Center (PDC) Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
NCSA/University of Illinois, University of Utah, University of Houston, USA
Contact
Johan Ihren
Parallel Computing Center, RIT, Sweden
johani@pdc.kth.se
http://www.pdc.kth.se/projects/vr-cube