Vis5D on the Geowall

Vis5D on the Geowall

Electronic Visualization Laboratory, UIC

Introduction
System Requirements
Installing Vis5D
Configuring stereo with nView Clone mode
Running Vis5D
Support

Introduction

Vis5D is a free OpenGL-based volumetric visualization program for scientific datasets in 3+ dimensions. Due to recent advancements in Nvidia's drivers for the Quadro4 card, you can now use Vis5D on the AGAVE / Geowall. This document describes how.

See the Vis5D homepage for in-depth documentation about Vis5D. Read ahead for information specific to running this program on the AGAVE/Geowall.

System Requirements

You need to build a Geowall. The Geowall website has a parts list, instructions and links to vendors selling a 'Geowall Bundle'. However you will need a Nvidia Quadro4 video card in the PC since this card supports quad-buffered stereo. The PC should also run linux - we recommend Red Hat Linux 7.3.

Driver Details
Click here to get the drivers for the Quadro4 from the Nvidia website. You must download 2 files: a GLX driver file and a kernel driver file. If you are unsure of which file you need please download and run NVchooser.

Tested System Configurations

Operating System	Dual boot Redhat Linux 7.3/Windows XP
Graphics Card	Nvidia Quadro4 XGl 900
Memory	1 GB RAM, 40 GB storage
Processor	Intel P4 1.2 GHz

Extra software
The VIs5d page describes software that you should have on your system before you get Vis5d here. You already have OpenGL support since you got the Nvidia's drivers, so you may not need Mesa. We downloaded NetCDF to test if we could load NetCDF files.

Back to Top

Installing Vis5D

Click here to download Vis5d from the Vis5d dwnload page. The downloaded file could be named vis5d+-1.0.1.tar.gz. Extract the contents of this file with the command

tar zxvf vis5d+-1.0.1.tar.gz

Run the configure script to create makefiles and then run make. Look at the options that configure provides here.

cd vis5d+-1.0.1
     ./configure
     make

If you want, you can run the program right away by typing:

src/vis5d hole.v5d -path src
             
hole.v5d is a sample data file included with Vis5D. The -path src argument is necessary to tell it where the map data files are located; it will no longer be need after you do a 'make install' (see below). Click and drag in the display window to rotate it, and click on buttons in the lower portion of the control window to plot the data.

If this completes succesfully, you will then want to install Vis5D:

make install

If you want to uninstall Vis5d at any time, you can do:

make uninstall

Configuring stereo with nView Clone mode

The graphics card has two outputs. If you enable the quad-buffered stereo mode and clone mode, you will see stereo when you run Vis5d.

Edit the configuration file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. Add the following lines

Option "TwinViewOrientation" "Clone"
Option "Stereo" "4"

Option 4 is used for TwinView clone mode stereo.The left eye is displayed on the first display, and the right eye is displayed on the second display. Here is a sample XF86Config-4 file. You can also read the README file that came with the Nvidia drivers. Restart the machine for the changes to take effect.

Running Vis5d

Once this is done, the vis5d program, utilities, data, and libraries are installed under /usr/local, or wherever you specified with the --prefix argument to configure (as described above). You should now be able to run it by simply typing

vis5d *.v5d -projection stereo

(if you installed in a system directory) or by typing

prefix/bin/vis5d *.v5d -projection stereo

(otherwise, where prefix was the argument to --prefix), in either case followed by the name of a data file.

Support

A lot of this documentation is taken from the Vis5d homepage and the Nvidia README. You may want to look at those if you have problems. Otherwise send your questions and suggestions to the CAVERN group at cavern@evl.uic.edu.