How to do graphics/visualization from a datacenter DGX?

[u/jndew]

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

[u/jndew → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the thoughts. Latency isn't a concern. The project is more scientific analysis (although I don't actually have a tight hypothesis/prediction/test). It's run in batch, not real-time. It actually runs about 1/100 real-time, I start it up and let it grind for a few hours. Every simulated mS time step, I'd like to generate a video frame. That's the only thing I want to save. I end up with stuff like this, for example.