For the past week, I’ve been running a set of simulations on the Gordon supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. While I waited for the simulations to complete, I improved many internal features of GSnap and made plans for much more significant improvements. Those plans can be found on the GSnap development wiki, here. I’ve also registered a domain name that will point to GSnap’s official web site. Currently, the page is a very rough draft. I’ll add more CSS styling and get rid of the frameset when GSnap is launched. The domain is gsnap.org.

On the path to implementing the planned improvements to the code, I have allowed GSnap to render general rectangular images. Previously, only square images could be rendered because I only set a single resolution that acted as both the x and the y resolution. It sounds simple to generalize a square image to a rectangular image, but in reality it was a lot of work.  Hundreds of lines of code spanning 10 source files needed to be edited. The entire process took nearly 4 hours to complete and test. Beyond just creating rectangular images, the volume renderer now uses a volume of arbitrary depth; the volume was previously a cube, now it is a rectangular prism.

In addition to the image and volume generalizations, a series of incremental improvements have been made to the image quality. The image below shows a 720p HD resolution frame from a 2:1 mass ratio merger simulation that recently finished running on the supercomputer.

 

And here is a frame from a 1:1 merger

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2012 at 10:13 am and is filed under regular update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.