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I need to simulate the movement of a large number of agents. The processes that govern the agents' movement are complex and so the entire process requires parallelisation. The output from this simulation needs to be visualised in 3D. As I will be running this simulation across many different nodes (MPI or even MPI+GPGPU) I do not want the simulation to run in real time.

I need a rendering library that:

  • Can render offline
  • Is easy to use
  • Can handle soft body deformation and collision

(i'm not look for awesome AAA video game quality graphics, in addition the movement code will take up enough CPU time so I don't want to further slow the application down by adding heavy weight rendering code)

This problem MUST have been solved before - there's plenty of visualisation in HPC

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Check for paraview (www.paraview.org), which is a widly used open source visualization software package for HPC. It should fit all your requirements.

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Perhaps VisIt is a good fit to your requirements.

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Both paraview and visit support data formats that allow you to write whatever data you have on each processor of a parallel computation into one file per processor and then later visualize all the files at the same time. For paraview, the collection of files that make up a single time step is the .pvtu file; for visit, the "Getting Data into Visit" manual describes the format of a .visit file. In either case, every processor would produce a .vtk or .vtu file and you would later (offline) visualize the whole bunch.

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  • $\begingroup$ so will I be able to see "little 3D cylinders moving, crashing into each other and deforming? $\endgroup$
    – RNs_Ghost
    Nov 13 '12 at 13:35
  • $\begingroup$ That depends on what you write to your vtk/vtu files. $\endgroup$
    – Wolfgang Bangerth
    Nov 13 '12 at 14:59

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