LiveInventor: An Interactive Development Environment for Robot Autonomy

LiveInventor is an interactive development environment for robot autonomy developed at NASA Ames Research Center. It extends the industry-standard OpenInventor graphics library and scenegraph file format to include kinetic and kinematic information, a physics-simulation library, an embedded Scheme interpreter, and a distributed communication system

EUPHORIA: End-User Construction of Direct Manipulation User Interfaces for Distributed Applications

The Programmers\u27 Playground is a software library and run-time system for creating distributed multimedia applications from collections of reusable software moduels. This paper presents the design and implementation of EUPHORIA, Playground\u27s user interface management system. Implemented as a Playground module, EUPHORIA allows end-users to create direct manipulation graphical user interfaces (GUIs) exclusively through the use of a graphics editor. No programming is required. At run-time, attributes of the GUI state can be exposed and connected to external Playground modules, allowing the user to vosualize and directly manipulate state information in remote Playground modules. Features of EUPHORIA include real-time direct manipulation graphics, constraint-based editing and visualization, imaginary alignment objects, user-definable types, and user-definable widgets with alternative representations

A user's guide for DTIZE an interactive digitizing and graphical editing computer program

A guide for DTIZE, a two dimensional digitizing program with graphical editing capability, is presented. DTIZE provides the capability to simultaneously create and display a picture on the display screen. Data descriptions may be permanently saved in three different formats. DTIZE creates the picture graphics in the locator mode, thus inputting one coordinate each time the terminator button is pushed. Graphic input devices (GIN) are also used to select function command menu. These menu commands and the program's interactive prompting sequences provide a complete capability for creating, editing, and permanently recording a graphical picture file. DTIZE is written in FORTRAN IV language for the Tektronix 4081 graphic system utilizing the Plot 80 Distributed Graphics Library (DGL) subroutines. The Tektronix 4953/3954 Graphic Tablet with mouse, pen, or joystick are used as graphics input devices to create picture graphics

Compute Language Interface: A Transparent Wrapper Library For Multi Cpu-Gpu

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) processing capability is getting more powerful than before. Compute intensive and data parallelism applications are proven to perform better on the GPU than on the Central Processing Unit (CPU). However, available General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) programming frameworks which are available publicly are unable to reach beyond the single computer limitation to utilize multiple CPUs and GPUs at different computers in a distributed computing system easily. This study presents the Compute Language Interface (CLI) which is a wrapper library that enables the existing OpenCL applications access to all available CPUs and GPUs in a distributed computing system through Message Passing Interface (MPI) transparently. It is designed to improve the scalability of the OpenCL applications on a distributed computing system while maintaining the same set of application programming interface (API) in the original OpenCL library. The applications can access all available CPUs and GPUs in different computers in a distributed computing system as ifall the CPUs and GPUs are in the same computer

A Distributed Algebra System for Time Integration on Parallel Computers

We present a distributed algebra system for efficient and compact implementation of numerical time integration schemes on parallel computers and graphics processing units (GPU). The software implementation combines the time integration library Odeint from Boost with the OpenFPM framework for scalable scientific computing. Implementing multi-stage, multi-step, or adaptive time integration methods in distributed-memory parallel codes or on GPUs is challenging. The present algebra system addresses this by making the time integration methods from Odeint available in a concise template-expression language for numerical simulations distributed and parallelized using OpenFPM. This allows using state-of-the-art time integration schemes, or switching between schemes, by changing one line of code, while maintaining parallel scalability. This enables scalable time integration with compact code and facilitates rapid rewriting and deployment of simulation algorithms. We benchmark the present software for exponential and sigmoidal dynamics and present an application example to the 3D Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion problem on both CPUs and GPUs in only 60 lines of code

Distributed OpenGL Rendering in Network Bandwidth Constrained Environments

Display walls made from multiple monitors are often used when very high resolution images are required. To utilise a display wall, rendering information must be sent to each computer that the monitors are connect to. The network is often the performance bottleneck for demanding applications, like high performance 3D animations. This paper introduces ClusterGL; a distribution library for OpenGL applications. ClusterGL reduces network traffic by using compression, frame differencing and multi-cast. Existing applications can use ClusterGL without recompilation. Benchmarks show that, for most applications, ClusterGL outperforms other systems that support unmodified OpenGL applications including Chromium and BroadcastGL. The difference is larger for more complex scene geometries and when there are more display machines. For example, when rendering OpenArena, ClusterGL outperforms Chromium by over 300% on the Symphony display wall at The University of Waikato, New Zealand. This display has 20 monitors supported by five computers connected by gigabit Ethernet, with a full resolution of over 35 megapixels. ClusterGL is freely available via Google Code

Accelerating Monte Carlo simulations with an NVIDIA® graphics processor

Modern graphics cards, commonly used in desktop computers, have evolved beyond a simple interface between processor and display to incorporate sophisticated calculation engines that can be applied to general purpose computing. The Monte Carlo algorithm for modelling photon transport in turbid media has been implemented on an NVIDIA® 8800gt graphics card using the CUDA toolkit. The Monte Carlo method relies on following the trajectory of millions of photons through the sample, often taking hours or days to complete. The graphics-processor implementation, processing roughly 110 million scattering events per second, was found to run more than 70 times faster than a similar, single-threaded implementation on a 2.67 GHz desktop computer