VizWorld.com

An interesting project called the “Anti Grain Geometry Project”, or AGG Project, aims to develop a library for detailed development of graphics algorithms, without any of the constraints of libraries like OpenGL.

Anti-Grain Geometry is designed as a set of loosely coupled algorithms and class templates united with a common idea, so that all the components can be easily combined. Also, the template based design allows you to replace any part of the library without the necessity to modify a single byte in the existing code.

Also AGG is designed keeping in mind extensibility and flexibility. Basically I just wanted to create a toolkit that would allow me (and anyone else) to add new fancy algorithms very easily.

Aimed primarily at development of algorithms, the author concedes that working with it can be a bit difficult.  However, the results he shows in just basic antialiasing work show some great promise.

via Anti-Grain Geometry – Introduction.

Graphics, Science agg, library, sdk

While the individual components are nothing new, I hadn’t heard of NVidia calling the whole system “AXE”, for Application Acceleration Engines.

NVIDIA® application acceleration engines are highly optimized software modules enabling developers to take maximum advantage of the GPU with valuable, high performance capabilities that are license free to develop with and deploy.

NVIDIA is committed to ensuring engines continue advancing to take maximum advantage of the latest NVIDIA GPU innovations while also maintaining their leading-edge capabilities. Applications employing acceleration engines can rapidly exploit GPU advancements as consistent engine APIs evolve to leverage new methods. In doing so, NVIDIA is empowering developers to deliver the latest capabilities to their users in the shortest amount of time.

The complete suite consists of SceniX (scene graph), CompleX (GPU scaling system), PhysX (GPU accelerated Physics), and OptiX (ray-tracing), along with the usual CgFX and CUDA.

via NVIDIA® Application Acceleration Engines.

Science axe, complex, gpgpu, library, nvidia, optix, physx, scenix

Over at Insideria, Theresa Neil has gathered a list of 28 toolkits for visualization and charting that covers web languages, flash, silverlight, and more.

We’re currently working with a dozen different clients, all web application (re)designs. All of these clients have data rich applications and need equally rich data visualizations to help their end customers analyze data quickly and effectively.

What makes my job really interesting is that these clients are in different industries and are using different technologies. So we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight.

via 28 Rich Data Visualization Tools – InsideRIA.

Science library, visualization, Website

Perlita Labs has an infographic online comparing the many topologies, visualizations, and data structures available in a wide variety of popular visualization tools.  It’s pretty comprehensive, including about 13 different libraries and almost 20 different features.

Comparing Data Visualization Tools.

Science infographic, library, perlita

CUDA and GPGPU developers can head on over to the NVidia Developer Zone and, if you’re a registered developer, download the beta of the new CUDA Toolkit 3.0 features early support for the upcoming Fermi architecture.  Also:

• CUDA Driver / Runtime Buffer Interoperability, which allows applications using the CUDA Driver API to also use libraries implemented using the CUDA C Runtime.
• A new, separate version of the CUDA C Runtime (CUDART) for debugging in emulation-mode.
• C++ Class Inheritance and Template Inheritance support for increased programmer productivity
• A new unified interoperability API for Direct3D and OpenGL, with support for:
  • OpenGL texture interop
  • Direct3D 11 interop support
• cuda-gdb hardware debugging support for applications that use the CUDA Driver API
• New CUDA Memory Checker reports misalignment and out of bounds errors, available as a debugging mode within cuda-gdb and also as a stand-alone utility.
• CUDA Toolkit libraries are now versioned, enabling applications to require a specific version, support multiple versions explicitly, etc.
• CUDA C/C++ kernels are now compiled to standard ELF format

CUDA Toolkit 3.0 beta released – NVIDIA Forums.

Hardware, Science api, cuda, library, nvidia

All of you young budding game developers have a new toolkit in your arsenal, the newly released Unreal Development Kit.  A new free version of the popular Unreal3 & Development tools, it brings the power of the Unreal Engine into hands of game developers worldwide. (…)

Graphics, Science engine, library, sdk, unreal, videogame

GPU Ray-tracers, start your engines.. (…)

Science cuda, gpgpu, library, nvidia, optix, raytracing, software

ITK, the popular image processing toolkit,  is about to turn 10 years old, having begun in November 1999.  To celebrate, Kitware is holding a few events to commemorate the occasion and help push ITK to the next level.  They’ve also got a bit of history about the project online. (…)

Science itk, kitware, library, software

The Java Neural Network Framework “Neuroph” has just been updated with a few new routines to aid in Image Processing work, mostly image recognition.  On their website they’ve posted some examples and howto’s demonstrating what you can do. (…)

Science algorithm, api, image processing, java, library, neural network

Kitware’s popular image processing companion to VTK, ITK, has just seen a new release (version 3.16) that offers some new features and important bugfixes. (…)

Science itk, kitware, library, software

One of MIT’s TR35 Young Innovator Awards, Jeffrey Heer has created a new javascript data-visualization library called “ProtoVis”. (…)

Science javascript, library, protovis, web

One highly anticipated piece of software amongst the HPC and GPGPU groups has been “CULA”, a port of the popular LAPack linear algebra library to CUDA systems allowing a near-painless performance boost by simply installing a high-end NVidia card and recompiling your code.  That day is getting closer, as EM Photonics has released a beta of their upcoming version of this, ‘CULATools’. (…)

Hardware, Science cuda, gpgpu, hpc, lapack, library, nvidia, software

A new library from the University of Utah and Disney discusses a new UV texture mapping library called ‘PTex’ which can map UV coordinates to models on a fully automatic basis with for models or arbitrary complexity and size. (…)

Graphics, Science disney, library, ptex, texture

The backbone of the free DICOM Visualization and Analysis tool SMIViewer has been released as SMISDK. (…)

Science biomed, dicom, library, sdk, volume

News from NVidia about the new CUDA 2.3 toolkit is out, and there’s a huge list of changes.  Some big ones to catch your eye:

CUFFT now supports double-precision
CUDA-GDB and Visual Profiler are included
Improved support for fp16-fp32 conversion allows fp16 memory storage with fp32 computation. (…)

Science cuda, library, nvidia, software

“onezerothrice” has been hard at work developing a new Augmented Reality library to work with Flash, complete with a predefined Marker, called ARtisan. (…)

Science augmented reality, flash, library

Everyone’s favorite OpenGL Software emulator has just released a v7.5 for development.  Big feature in this release is the new “Gallium3D” infrastructure with support for Intel 915/945 and Cell.  They’ve also added support for a few new OpenGL Extensions (framebuffer objects, vertex_arrays in bgra, etc) and improved a few quirks in the GLSL compiler. (…)

Science cell, library, mesa, software

Microsoft has just released Silverlight3, and it includes new browser support, thousands of new API’s, and GPU accelerated video codecs and rendering functionality.

Science flash, gpgpu, library, microsoft, silverlight, web

At the recent HiPS2009 Workshops in Rome, Italy, a paper was presented on a new C++ CUDA framework. (…)

Science cuda, library, paper

The OpenToolkit Library has just released versions 0.9.8-1 and 0.9.9, bringing support for OpenGL, OpenAL, and OpenCL to .NET.  Available for Windows, Linux, and OSX, it’s a common library to 3d graphics, audio, and GPGPU programming. (…)

Science .net, library, opencl, opengl, opentk, software