VizWorld.com

If you use Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE for development and write any shader code (GLSL, HLSL, CG, etc) then you definitely should check out NShader.  It’s a free addon that adds syntax highlight for those languages, making Visual Studio a much more fully functional IDE for those who work in shader languages.  It does have a few limitations:

• The CG syntax highlighter is using the same HLSL syntax highlighter (they have similar keywords).
• No syntax analyzing and checking. NShader only use a basic tokenizer to extract keywords. Future versions may include syntax analyser.
• No braces/bracket matching
• No completion
• No formatting

But given how poor Visual Studio’s existing support is, it’s a huge benefit.

via NShader – HLSL – GLSL – CG – Shader Syntax Highlighter AddIn for Visual Studio.

Science glsl, hlsl, plugin, programming, visual studio

The OpenCL Studio has just hit its first beta release at an integrated IDE to merge OpenCL and OpenGL programming into a single interface.

OpenCL Studio combines OpenCL and OpenGL into a single integrated development environment that allows you to visualize OpenCL computation using 3D rendering techniques. The editor hides much of the complexity of the underlying APIs while still providing flexibility via the Lua scripting language. Integrated source code editors and debugging capabilities for OpenCL, GLSL, and Lua, as well as a toolbox of 2D user interface widgets provide you with a framework to develop a wide range of parallel algorithms.

The real beauty is that you can change your OpenGL and OpenCL code on the fly, and easily map it onto UI widgets for adjustable parameters, creating a great “adjustable” system for fine-tuning your OpenCL kernels.  It is still in Beta, and requires an NVidia card with drivers 196 or better, or an AMD card with the latest stream SDK’s installed.  Currently only available on windows.

OpenCL Studio, a parallel programming environment.

Science ide, opencl, opengl, programming

Par4All aims to do “source to source” conversion of your code from Fortran or C to forms suitable for several parallel programming platforms like CUDA, OpenCL, MPI, and more.

The interest of the source-to-source approach is to capitalize on the real value of an application (its source!) and generating other sources that can be used by the better back-ends available: optimized compilers for a given processor, vendor compilers for embedded processors, CUDA or OpenCL for GPU, OpenMP, MPI… One source, run everywhere!

Supports C99 and Fortran 95, and a wide variety of platforms. Get full details, and the software, at their site.

Par4All.

Science cuda, mpi, opencl, par4all, programming

Back in 2002, Thanassis Tsiodras decided to begin investigating the power of SSE on the new Athlon CPU’s and wrote a rather complex real-time Mandlebrot zoomer program.  Now, 7 years later, he revisits his code and rewrites using NVidia’s CUDA to startling effect:

In less than one hour, I went from my rather complex SSE inline assembly, to a simple, clear Mandelbrot implementation… that run… 15 times faster!

Let me say this again: 1500% faster. Jaw dropping. Or put a different way: I went from 147fps at 320×240… to 210fps… at 1024×768!

via A realtime Mandelbrot zoomer in SSE assembly and CUDA.

Science cuda, nvidia, programming

Fans of MAXON’s Cinema4D will have a new tool at their disposal thanks to an official partnership between MAXON and the developers of a python scripting library, Py4D.

“Python is easy to learn and provides similar access to CINEMA 4D functionality as the C++ SDK,” commented Harald Schneider, CTO and co-founder of MAXON. “We want the CINEMA 4D community to know that we are supporting the development of Py4D so they can confidently invest resources in Python and Py4D to enhance their own production pipelines.”

Choosing Python over C++ is a no-brainer for most developers (I know I use Python every chance I get, resorting only to C for raw speed).  Hopefully the official partnership will improve the support even further, possibly making it ship with Cinema4D in a future release.  See the full release after the break.

Read more…

Graphics cinema4d, maxon, programming, py4d, python, script

Microsoft, unhappy with the success of visualization-oriented languages like Processing, has just announced a new language targeted at non-programmers for interactive infographics called “Vedea”.  A sample:

myData = DataSet(“mydata.csv”);
currentYear := slider.Value + 1900;
bubbles := from row in myData
where row.Year :== currentYear
select new Circle()
{
X = row.Latitude,
Y = row.Longitude,
Radius = row.Population * scalingFactor,
Fill = BlackBodyPalette(1., 1., row.DeltaCarbon)
};
Scene["USMap"].Add(bubbles);

In a blog post, Martin Calsyn of Microsoft Research said the second line creates a slider bar, the third line creates a collection of bubble buttons, the next few lines create the bubbles themselves, and the last line adds the bubbles to a U.S. map. I’ll just take Calsyn’s word for it.

The language is expected to be available in early 2010 at the Microsoft Research Vedea Page.

via Microsoft details new Vedea visualization language.

Science infographic, interactive, language, microsoft, programming, vedea

Just saw this on the ParaView Mailing List, MIRARCO has released a Wizard system to accelerate development of ParaView Plugins. Simply answer a few questions and it will create C++ Templates, an XML file, and the necessary CMake file to build it.  Then just fill in the blanks.

Plugin Wizard is a free, GPL/OpenSource application developed by MIRARCO. Developed using Python and Qt (PyQt), Plugin Wizard will allow you and your developers to save incredible amounts of time when creating your Paraview plugins.

via Plugin Wizard.

Science paraview, programming