Animation rendering is a very computationally intensive process that involves large files and a lot of creativity to create. The requirements of a HPC Cluster differs from that in a engineering perspective. Machines used to help render these animations are called render-farms. Below are some notes that highlights some of the things when creating solutions for a render-farm.
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Oil and Gas Industries & HPC
The oil industries are divided into Upstream & Downstream activities. Upstream refers to pre-discovery activities & pre-processing activities, while Downstream refers to post-discovery activities & processing activities.
Most computations are done in the upstream activity and can be divided in to 3 main classes.
- Field data collection
- Data processing
- Result dispatch & drilling
The complexities of these activities are described below.
Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment and Synergy for OSX
Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) is a software technology that allows cluster based video walls to be created and used for large scale visualization applications. It essentially creates a large video space which is controlled from a master computer, and pushing the images rendered on that computer unto a tiled video wall.
Comparatively, the purpose of Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) and Chromium seems to be different technologies used to both achieve large scale visualization. The implementation of how it is done, however, seems to be different. At this point, Chromium does not seem to work well on Macs. This leaves the only open-source option of building graphics clusters to SAGE. This procedure highlights the main steps in order to create a SAGE based graphics cluster for Macs.
Continue reading Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment and Synergy for OSX
Quartz Composer based Visualizer Walls
I believe that the official sources gives a much better introduction to Quartz Composer then me coming up with something on my own. So here they are.
From http://developers.apple.com …
“Quartz Composer is a groundbreaking graphics development environment that allows you to explore the incredible power of the graphics stack of Mac OS X Tiger. With Quartz Composer, you can easily combine the capabilities of Cocoa, Quartz 2D, Core Image, OpenGL, and QuickTime, all using an approachable visual programming paradigm. Use Quartz Composer to prototype Core Image filters, build engaging screen savers, create custom user-interface widgets, make data-driven visual effects, and even perform live performance animations.”
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer …
“Quartz Composer is a node based visual programming language provided as part of the Xcode development environment in Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger” for processing and rendering graphical data. Quartz Composer uses OpenGL, Core Image, Core Video, and other technologies to build an API and a developer tool around a simple visual programming paradigm. Apple has embedded Quartz technologies deeply into the operating system. Compositions created in Quartz Composer can be played standalone in any QuickTime aware application (although only on Mac OS X 10.4 and later), from inside the Quartz Composer application, or can be embedded into a Cocoa or Carbon application. Because Quartz Composer makes extensive use of hardware acceleration and pixel shaders, it is recommended to have a recent graphics card with at least 32MB of VRAM.”