The Homunculus Project

The Homunculus Project at the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC) focuses on the development of virtual reality and visualization technology to help scientists and engineers to better understand their computer software systems and data. This project is a high performance computing (HPC), multi-dimensional virtual laboratory for construction, simulation, evaluation, perception, and comprehension of complex software systems and simulations.

The Introduction page contains a more in-depth description of the project.

Flatland

Flatland is the virtual environment developed to perform these investigations. Using Flatland as the base environment scientists can visualize and explore both their data and the computations that manipulate that data. Imagine, if you will, a scientist able to examine the real-time results of a simulation and, when he notices an anomally he would like to investigate, he turns to the program running the simulation and examines the code, possibly changing it on the fly. This is the dream of Flatland. The Flatland Gallery contains more images and movies of Flatland.

Availability and Documentation

Flatland is currently available to UNM partners and, with limitations, freely available to everyone via anonymous CVS. To get a copy of the system, use the following commands.

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@vis-cvs.hpc.unm.edu:/OPENCVS co -P Flatland
cd Flatland
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@vis-cvs.hpc.unm.edu:/OPENCVS co -P services
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@vis-cvs.hpc.unm.edu:/OPENCVS co -P usr_modules

For a list of frequently asked questions, see the Flatland FAQ.
Flatland documentation is currently unavailable.

Supported Systems

All unix systems that support posix threads and have OpenGL (or Mesa) and GLUT development support should run Flatland with no problems. Flatland is distributed as source, so run-time libraries are not sufficient. The system has been tested on SGI and Linux (running both Mesa and OpenGL libraries). Windows support is not currently available.

Input devices tested so far include: Flock-of-Birds tracking, with support for one head tracker and two ``wand'' trackers, mouse, keyboard, and joysticks. Output devices include the computer main screen (default is an X window), large screen output devices, head mounted helmet displays, and an experimental output to a planetarium dome. Stereo output is supported.

AHPCC Visualization Laboratory

The Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center Visualization Laboratory celebrated its grand opening April 6, 1999. Remote output from an eight processor SGI Onyx 2 with an Infinte Reality Engine as well as from an SGI Onyx 1 with one Reality Engine are piped via fiber optic cable into the lab, isolating users of the lab from the noise and cold environment of the machine room. In addition to these two SGI machines the lab contains an SGI Octain and various PC equipment Linux voice recognition system and several high end PCs with NVIDIA graphics cards.

As well as the displays that normally come with all of those machines, the lab boasts a six foot by eight foot rear projection screen, capable of 2000x2000 resolution. This screen is also stereo capable, and currently drives eight Stereo Graphics Crystaleyes stereo glasses. The theater style seating makes for an excellent demonstration room, as well as an ideal place for collaborative visualization efforts.