Rocketeer Voyager Home Page
Rocketeer Voyager is a batch mode version of Rocketeer that processes in parallel a series
of snapshots from a simulation.
It shares its code base with Rocketeer and has nearly all of the capabilities of the interactive version.
Voyager exists on CSE's Linux cluster "turing" as
/home/jnorris/bin/Voyager and on the CSAR Suns as /projects1/Voyager/solaris/v1.0/Voyager. Copyright © 2001 by the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Voyager is a command line tool that takes as arguments a camera position file, a graphics operations file, and a list of HDF files to process.
The camera postion and graphics operations files are generated during an interactive session of Rocketeer
using a representative snapshot.
Voyager uses MPI to pass messages. Once each processor knows which files to process,
the camera position, what graphics operations to perform, and the ranges of the data
for the color scales, it can generate each individual image and save it to disk without
additional communication.
If the files reside on local disk, Voyager is scalable to
large numbers of processors.
Even if the files reside on a shared file system, Voyager scales well until
contention for I/O bandwidth becomes significant. On subsequent runs with
the same data (but possibly different camera positions, isosurface values, etc.) Voyager scales
well if much of the data has been saved by the system in local disk caches.
Like Rocketeer, Voyager works with Mesa/XFree86. However, for use on a large heterogeneous
cluster such as turing, CSAR contracted with Xi Graphics, Inc. to develop a commercial quality X server with a
virtual frame buffer that installs automatically on all nodes without regard to the graphics hardware or
requiring administrator intervention.