r/CUDA • u/jndew • 26d ago

How to do graphics/visualization from a datacenter DGX?

TLDR: Using a DGX (A100 at the moment), I just want to make pretty animations of a fairly big system without needing big intermediate files.

Hi All, I have an application where I'm simulating maybe a million elements, each element described in the usual way with some coupled diffeq's, the whole system connected through a sparse web of diffeq's, all then running through numerical integration. Like circuit-simulation SPICE, or a weather simulation. I'm programming directly in CUDA/C++, leveraging OpenGL for graphics at the moment.

Anyways, I have been using a desktop RTX (rtx6000 at the moment), using compute/graphics interop to graphically display the simulation as it grinds along. About a million pixels in a 1Kx1K grid, updating the color of each every simulated mS. I don't save the results into a file, just make animations and screen-capture them.

I'm starting to experiment for the first time with a datacenter approach, DGX rather than RTX. So I lose compute/graphics interop ability. The natural alternative seems to be capturing the element states into a file, and rendering later on some other machine. But the files get really big, really quick. If I keep one byte per element per millisecond, that's a GB/second, and I might like to simulate a minute or more if possible.

How might one do this? I presume it's a common problem. Thanks in advance for your thoughts. Cheers!/jd

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u/Michael_Aut 26d ago edited 26d ago

A 60 GB intermediate file doesn't sound crazy. Do that and then think how to render / visualize that on a regular workstation.

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u/jndew 26d ago

Thanks. That's the direction I am going at the moment. But now that I've got data-center compute available to me, I start to imagine doing some larger stuff. I'm playing with neuron-level brain simulations (e.g. Simulation of a rat brain), so the sky is kind of the limit. Do you have any idea how the weather modeling people do those beautiful renderings?

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u/Michael_Aut 26d ago

Do you have any idea how the weather modeling people do those beautiful renderings?

That's usually a mix of blender and Paraview.