vfleet: A C++ repository from jswelling

           VFleet Distributed Volume Renderer
                      Version 1.1
          Release Notes and Installation Guide

VFleet is a volume rendering system for Unix platforms. It can run either locally or in distributed mode, using PVM to distribute the volume rendering task across multiple platforms. VFleet is a software- only renderer; it makes no use of special hardware support on the platforms on which it runs. Up-to-date documentation is available via World Wide Web in http://www.psc.edu/Packages/VFleet_Home . Compiled binaries are available by anonymous FTP from ftp.psc.edu, in the directory pub/vfleet. The correspondence between machine architectures and tar file names is as follows:

vfleet1.1_sgi.tar.gz SGI MIPS hardware under IRIX 6.2 or higher, compiled with the -mips2 flag (32 bit mode) vfleet1.1_alpha.tar.gz DEC ALPHA architecture under Digital Ultrix 3.2 vfleet1.1_sun.tar.gz Sun SPARC architecture under SunOS 5.4 vfleet1.1_hp.tar.gz HP PA Risc architecture under HP-UX vfleet1.1_linux.tar.gz Intel Linux 2.0.27 distribution- note that this requires Infomagic Motif; see README_LINUX

We would be happy to provide binaries for other architectures, if someone can offer machines to do the compilations.
For source code contact Joel Welling at welling@psc.edu . VFleet is written in C++.

To install the code, do the following:

Install PVM version 3.3 if you plan to use the code in distributed mode.
Get and untar the appropriate tar file. This will produce a directory with the following files in it:

vfleet1.1/bytestohdf vfleet1.1/default_bbox_tfun.tfn vfleet1.1/default_block_tfun.tfn vfleet1.1/default_grad_tfun.tfn vfleet1.1/default_mask_tfun.tfn vfleet1.1/default_ssum_tfun.tfn vfleet1.1/default_sum_tfun.tfn vfleet1.1/default_table_tfun.tfn vfleet1.1/default_tfun.tfn vfleet1.1/floatstohdf vfleet1.1/logserver vfleet1.1/sample.tfn vfleet1.1/servman vfleet1.1/vfleet vfleet1.1/vfleet.uid vfleet1.1/vortices.hdf vfleet1.1/vrenserver

The Silicon Graphics distribution also contains the file vfleet1.1/vfleet_gl. This is an alternate version of the vfleet executable which uses Silicon Graphics GL for display. It should be treated as described below for the file vfleet.

Move or link vrenserver, logserver, and servman into the appropriate PVM directory, for example ${PVM_ROOT}/bin/SGI5 or ${PVM_ROOT}/bin/PMAX. This will make sense once you have installed PVM.
Create a subdirectory called "uid" in your home directory and move or link vfleet.uid into it. There are other ways to access UID files, but this is the easiest to describe. If you are installing VFleet for general use, you might put vfleet.uid in /usr/lib/X11/uid or your system's equivalent. See the manual page for MrmOpenHierarchy(3X) for system-specific information. If your account is set up so that the environment variable UIDPATH is set, for example by a line in your .cshrc file, you will want to make sure the location of vfleet.uid is in that path. For example, you might add the following line to the bottom of your .cshrc file:

setenv UIDPATH $HOME/uid/%U:${UIDPATH}

Pick a directory for VFleet-specific default files to reside in, for example the directory into which you have untarred the files. Modify your .cshrc file to set the environment variable VFLEET_ROOT to point to that directory.
Add the other executables, bytestohdf, floatstohdf, and vfleet itself, to your path or move them to some directory that is already in your path.

That's it. sample.tfn and vortices.hdf are sample files to let you try out VFleet. They are small, so they can be used locally, with no need to fire things up in distributed mode. You don't need to install PVM to do this.

Please see the WWW page at http://www.psc.edu/Packages/VFleet_Home for additional operating information; VFleet itself has a lot of help information included. Please send your comments and bug reports to me at the address below.

Thanks for trying it out, -Joel Welling Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center welling@psc.edu

jswelling/vfleet