Crowd simulation and visualization

Large-scale simulation and visualization are essential topics in areas as different as sociology, physics, urbanism, training, entertainment among others. This kind of systems requires a vast computational power and memory resources commonly available in High Performance Computing HPC platforms. Currently, the most potent clusters have heterogeneous architectures with hundreds of thousands and even millions of cores. The industry trends inferred that exascale clusters would have thousands of millions. The technical challenges for simulation and visualization process in the exascale era are intertwined with difficulties in other areas of research, including storage, communication, programming models and hardware. For this reason, it is necessary prototyping, testing, and deployment a variety of approaches to address the technical challenges identified and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each proposed solution. The focus of this research is interactive large-scale crowd simulation and visualization. To exploit to the maximum the capacity of the current HPC infrastructure and be prepared to take advantage of the next generation. The project develops a new approach to scale crowd simulation and visualization on heterogeneous computing cluster using a task-based technique. Its main characteristic is hardware agnostic. It abstracts the difficulties that imply the use of heterogeneous architectures like memory management, scheduling, communications, and synchronization — facilitating development, maintenance, and scalability. With the goal of flexibility and take advantage of computing resources as best as possible, the project explores different configurations to connect the simulation with the visualization engine. This kind of system has an essential use in emergencies. Therefore, urban scenes were implemented as realistic as possible; in this way, users will be ready to face real events. Path planning for large-scale crowds is a challenge to solve, due to the inherent dynamism in the scenes and vast search space. A new path-finding algorithm was developed. It has a hierarchical approach which offers different advantages: it divides the search space reducing the problem complexity, it can obtain a partial path instead of wait for the complete one, which allows a character to start moving and compute the rest asynchronously. It can reprocess only a part if necessary with different levels of abstraction. A case study is presented for a crowd simulation in urban scenarios. Geolocated data are used, they were produced by mobile devices to predict individual and crowd behavior and detect abnormal situations in the presence of specific events. It was also address the challenge of combining all these individual’s location with a 3D rendering of the urban environment. The data processing and simulation approach are computationally expensive and time-critical, it relies thus on a hybrid Cloud-HPC architecture to produce an efficient solution. Within the project, new models of behavior based on data analytics were developed. It was developed the infrastructure to be able to consult various data sources such as social networks, government agencies or transport companies such as Uber. Every time there is more geolocation data available and better computation resources which allow performing analysis of greater depth, this lays the foundations to improve the simulation models of current crowds. The use of simulations and their visualization allows to observe and organize the crowds in real time. The analysis before, during and after daily mass events can reduce the risks and associated logistics costs.La simulación y visualización a gran escala son temas esenciales en áreas tan diferentes como la sociología, la física, el urbanismo, la capacitación, el entretenimiento, entre otros. Este tipo de sistemas requiere una gran capacidad de cómputo y recursos de memoria comúnmente disponibles en las plataformas de computo de alto rendimiento. Actualmente, los equipos más potentes tienen arquitecturas heterogéneas con cientos de miles e incluso millones de núcleos. Las tendencias de la industria infieren que los equipos en la era exascale tendran miles de millones. Los desafíos técnicos en el proceso de simulación y visualización en la era exascale se entrelazan con dificultades en otras áreas de investigación, incluidos almacenamiento, comunicación, modelos de programación y hardware. Por esta razón, es necesario crear prototipos, probar y desplegar una variedad de enfoques para abordar los desafíos técnicos identificados y evaluar las ventajas y desventajas de cada solución propuesta. El foco de esta investigación es la visualización y simulación interactiva de multitudes a gran escala. Aprovechar al máximo la capacidad de la infraestructura actual y estar preparado para aprovechar la próxima generación. El proyecto desarrolla un nuevo enfoque para escalar la simulación y visualización de multitudes en un clúster de computo heterogéneo utilizando una técnica basada en tareas. Su principal característica es que es hardware agnóstico. Abstrae las dificultades que implican el uso de arquitecturas heterogéneas como la administración de memoria, las comunicaciones y la sincronización, lo que facilita el desarrollo, el mantenimiento y la escalabilidad. Con el objetivo de flexibilizar y aprovechar los recursos informáticos lo mejor posible, el proyecto explora diferentes configuraciones para conectar la simulación con el motor de visualización. Este tipo de sistemas tienen un uso esencial en emergencias. Por lo tanto, se implementaron escenas urbanas lo más realistas posible, de esta manera los usuarios estarán listos para enfrentar eventos reales. La planificación de caminos para multitudes a gran escala es un desafío a resolver, debido al dinamismo inherente en las escenas y el vasto espacio de búsqueda. Se desarrolló un nuevo algoritmo de búsqueda de caminos. Tiene un enfoque jerárquico que ofrece diferentes ventajas: divide el espacio de búsqueda reduciendo la complejidad del problema, puede obtener una ruta parcial en lugar de esperar a la completa, lo que permite que un personaje comience a moverse y calcule el resto de forma asíncrona, puede reprocesar solo una parte si es necesario con diferentes niveles de abstracción. Se presenta un caso de estudio para una simulación de multitud en escenarios urbanos. Se utilizan datos geolocalizados producidos por dispositivos móviles para predecir el comportamiento individual y público y detectar situaciones anormales en presencia de eventos específicos. También se aborda el desafío de combinar la ubicación de todos estos individuos con una representación 3D del entorno urbano. Dentro del proyecto, se desarrollaron nuevos modelos de comportamiento basados ¿¿en el análisis de datos. Se creo la infraestructura para poder consultar varias fuentes de datos como redes sociales, agencias gubernamentales o empresas de transporte como Uber. Cada vez hay más datos de geolocalización disponibles y mejores recursos de cómputo que permiten realizar un análisis de mayor profundidad, esto sienta las bases para mejorar los modelos de simulación de las multitudes actuales. El uso de simulaciones y su visualización permite observar y organizar las multitudes en tiempo real. El análisis antes, durante y después de eventos multitudinarios diarios puede reducir los riesgos y los costos logísticos asociadosPostprint (published version

Hardware accelerated redundancy elimination in network system

With the tremendous growth in the amount of information stored on remote locations and cloud systems, many service providers are seeking ways to reduce the amount of redundant information sent across networks by using data de-duplication techniques. Data de-duplication can reduce network traffic without the loss of information, and consequently increase available network bandwidth by reducing redundant traffic. However, due to the heavy computation required for detecting and reducing redundant data transmission, de-duplication itself can become a bottleneck in high capacity links. We completed two parts of work in this research study, Hardware Accelerated Redundancy Elimination in Network Systems (HARENS) and Distributed Redundancy Elimination System Simulation (DRESS). HARENS can significantly improve the performance of redundancy elimination algorithm in a network system by leveraging General Purpose Graphic Processing Unit (GPGPU) techniques as well as other big data optimizations such as the use of a hierarchical multi-threaded pipeline, single machine Map-Reduce, and memory efficiency techniques. Our results indicate that throughput can be increased by a factor of 9 times compared to a naive implementation of the data de-duplication algorithm, providing a net transmission increase of up to 3.0 Gigabits per second (Gbps). DRESS provides further acceleration to the redundancy elimination in network system by deploying HARENS as the server\u27s side redundancy elimination module, and four cooperative distributed byte caches on the clients\u27 side. A client\u27s side distributed byte cache broadcast its cached chunks by sending hash values to other byte caches, so that they can keep a record of all the chunks in the cooperative distributed cache system. When duplications are detected, a client\u27s side byte cache can fetch a chunk directly from either its own cache or peer byte caches rather than server\u27s side redundancy elimination module. Our results indicate that bandwidth savings of the redundancy elimination system with cooperative distributed byte cache can be increased by 12% compared to the one without distributed byte cache, when transferring about 48 Gigabits of data

Haptic Interaction with 3D oriented point clouds on the GPU

Real-time point-based rendering and interaction with virtual objects is gaining popularity and importance as di�erent haptic devices and technologies increasingly provide the basis for realistic interaction. Haptic Interaction is being used for a wide range of applications such as medical training, remote robot operators, tactile displays and video games. Virtual object visualization and interaction using haptic devices is the main focus; this process involves several steps such as: Data Acquisition, Graphic Rendering, Haptic Interaction and Data Modi�cation. This work presents a framework for Haptic Interaction using the GPU as a hardware accelerator, and includes an approach for enabling the modi�cation of data during interaction. The results demonstrate the limits and capabilities of these techniques in the context of volume rendering for haptic applications. Also, the use of dynamic parallelism as a technique to scale the number of threads needed from the accelerator according to the interaction requirements is studied allowing the editing of data sets of up to one million points at interactive haptic frame rates

The Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment

We present the open source Astrophysical Multi-purpose Software Environment (AMUSE, www.amusecode.org), a component library for performing astrophysical simulations involving different physical domains and scales. It couples existing codes within a Python framework based on a communication layer using MPI. The interfaces are standardized for each domain and their implementation based on MPI guarantees that the whole framework is well-suited for distributed computation. It includes facilities for unit handling and data storage. Currently it includes codes for gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, hydrodynamics and radiative transfer. Within each domain the interfaces to the codes are as similar as possible. We describe the design and implementation of AMUSE, as well as the main components and community codes currently supported and we discuss the code interactions facilitated by the framework. Additionally, we demonstrate how AMUSE can be used to resolve complex astrophysical problems by presenting example applications.Comment: 23 pages, 25 figures, accepted for A&

Quad Axis Separation Framework for Bounding-Volume Hierarchies Construction

The construction of Bounding-Volume Hierarchies (BVH) for Virtual Environment application has been varied from the rigid bodies application type to the deformable bodies application. Numerous technique and specific instruction has been given from several researchers in order to make sure that the BVH can suite their application without any restriction. In this paper, we explore the capability of BVH using a technique called Quad Axis Separation Technique (QAS) that could efficiently create full-blown hierarchical tree using approximation of separating axes theorem for Virtual Environment. A theoretical implementation is carried out with standard experimental that is also been used by researcher to test their BVH in the Virtual Environment. We also believed that QAS could provide fast and efficient hierarchical tree construction and also enhance the speed and accuracy of the collision detection technique

GPU-accelerated large-eddy simulation of ship-ice interactions

This paper reports on the applicability of the Lattice Boltzmann based free surface flow solver elbe to the simulation of complex ship-ice interactions in marine engineering. In order to model the dynamics of these colliding rigid multi-body systems, elbe is coupled to the ODE physics engine. First, basic validations of the ODE collision and friction models are presented, particularly focusing on interacting triangle meshes that later will serve to describe the ice floes. Then, the basic methodology and initial validation of the fluid-structure coupling of elbe and ODE is presented. Finally, performance is addressed: As elbe uses graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate the numerical calculations, the coupled numerical tool allows for investigations of ship-ice interactions in very competitive computational time and on off-the-shelf desktop hardware

Coupling of an SPH-based solver with a multiphysics library

Financiado para publicación en acceso aberto: Universidade de Vigo/CISUGA two-way coupling between the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics-based (SPH) code with a multiphysics library to solve complex fluid-solid interaction problems is proposed. This work provides full access to the package for the use of this coupling by releasing the source code, completed with guidelines for its compilation and utilization, and self-contained template setups for practical uses of the novel implemented features, is provided here. The presented coupling expands the applicability of two different solvers allowing to simulate fluids, multibody systems, collisions with frictional contacts using either non-smooth contact (NSC) or smooth contact (SMC) methods, all integrated under the same framework. The fluid solver is the open-source code DualSPHysics, highly optimised for simulating free-surface phenomena and structure interactions, uniquely positioned as a general-purpose Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software with a GPU-accelerated solver. Mechanical systems that comprise collision detection and/or multibody dynamics are solved by the multiphysics library Project Chrono, which uses a Discrete Element Method (DEM). Therefore, this SPH-DEM coupling approach can manage interactions between fluid and complex multibody systems with relative constraints, springs, or mechanical joints.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. PID2020-113245RB-I00Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431C 2021/44Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED481A-2021/337Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Xunta de Galicia con fondos de la Unión Europea NextGenerationEU y el Fondo Europeo Marítimo y de Pesca | Ref. PRTR-C17.I