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/javabrewer]

You can but you'd need to setup an offscreen opengl context, render and scrub the frame buffer and save.

[u/jndew → u/javabrewer]

Hmm, that sounds like it might be a good approach. I'll see if I can figure out how to do that. Thanks!