Video: SDVis Overview & OpenSWR – A Scalable High Performance Software Rasterizer for SCIVIS

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15, Jim Jeffers from Intel presents an SDVis Overview. After that, Bruce Cherniak from Intel presents: OpenSWR: Fast SW Rendering within MESA. “This session has two talk for the price of one: (1) Software Defined Visualization: Modernizing Vis. A ground swell is underway to modernize HPC codes to take full advantage of the growing parallelism in today’s and tomorrow’s CPU’s. Visualization workflows are no exception and this talk will discuss the recent Software Defined Visualization efforts by Intel and Vis community partners to improve flexibility, performance and workflows for visual data analysis and rendering to maximize scientific understanding. (2) OpenGL rasterized rendering is a so called “embarrasingly” parallel workload. As such, multicore and manycore CPUs can provide strong, flexible and large memory footprint solutions, especially for large data rendering. OpenSWR is a MESA3D based parallel OpenGL software renderer from Intel that enables strong interactive performance for HPC visualization applications on workstations through supercomputing clusters without the I/O and memory limitations of GPUs. We will discuss the current feature support, performance and implementation of this open source OpenGL solution.”

Video: Rendering in Ensight with OpenSWR

“EnSight is a software program for visualizing, analyzing, and communicating data from computer simulations and/or experiments. The purpose of OpenSWR is to provide a high performance, highly scalable OpenGL compatible software rasterizer that allows use of unmodified visualization software. This allows working with datasets where GPU hardware isn’t available or is limiting. OpenSWR is completely CPU-based, and runs on anything from laptops, to workstations, to compute nodes in HPC systems. OpenSWR internally builds on top of LLVM, and fully utilizes modern instruction sets like Intel®Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE), and Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX and AVX2) to achieve high rendering performance.”