The project is concerned with the parallelisation of existing visualisation code on the Cenju-3 computer. There is a twofold purpose for this project.
1. Performance improvement of the visualisation code.
2. Investigating the effectiveness of the Cenju-3 architecture for visualisation applications.
The NLR does contract work for NEC in the area of Real-time Visualization for CFD flow-solvers. The project takes as a starting point the NEC software consisting of:
• A flow-solver, currently running on the NEC SX-3 vector-supercomputer. This flow-solver will be parallelised for the Cenju-3 and can also be replaced by NLR solvers.
• A user-interface (X/Motif), currently running on a NEC EW54800 workstation.
This user-interface will be changed intensively to integrate with the GRAVICS system for interaction with applications.
• Visualisation-code, currently running on the SX-3 and using an UltraNet frame buffer for presentation of graphics.
The visualisation-code will be reviewed to remove dependencies on a certain hardware infrastructure. This will result in a version that can be used in the NLR environment.
Part of the low-level graphics code will probably move to a graphics workstation and it is the high-level visualisation-code that should be parallelised for the Cenju-3.
The parallelisation should be performed in such a way that the code optimally uses the MPP architecture independent of the number of available processing elements. Essential
part of the project is the evaluation of the Cenju-3 hardware and software for suitability for this kind of application. This might result in suggestions for improvement of hardware or software to NEC.
