annala@neuro.usc.edu (A J Annala) (03/16/89)
We are considering purchasing DORE for three dimensional reconstructions
of brains from serial sections (CAT, NMR, PET, etc). However, the limited
information provided to date about required configurations says:
"Portable Dore is a generic verion of Dore that is portable to a
wide variety of platforms. In addition to the Titan, Portable
Dore can be compiled and run on a Sun-4 configured with GP2 and
CG5 graphics boards."
The question we have is: has anyone ported and run Dore on a SUN-III/160C
configuration using /dev/cgtwo0 as the image display device? Also, because
we have access to the San Diego Supercomputer Center, has anyone ported and
run Dore on the CRAY XMP-48 running CTSS? Has anyone done their ray tracing
on the Cray, displayed a rough image with a 24 to 8 bit color raster coding
program, and produced finished slides on the film recorder attached to Cray?
Anyone's comments and/or suggestions are welcome. While $250 vs. $15,000 is
a great proce break for universities, $250 is still a pretty significant cost
in my lab, and we'd like to be certain we can use the product before we buy it.
Thanks, AJ Annala, USC Neural, Informational & Behavioral Sciences Programjesse@ut-emx.UUCP (J. Driver) (03/17/89)
> > "Portable Dore is a generic verion of Dore that is portable to a > wide variety of platforms. In addition to the Titan, Portable > Dore can be compiled and run on a Sun-4 configured with GP2 and > CG5 graphics boards." > > The question we have is: has anyone ported and run Dore on a SUN-III/160C > configuration using /dev/cgtwo0 as the image display device? Also, because > we have access to the San Diego Supercomputer Center, has anyone ported and > run Dore on the CRAY XMP-48 running CTSS? Has anyone done their ray tracing > on the Cray, displayed a rough image with a 24 to 8 bit color raster coding > program, and produced finished slides on the film recorder attached to Cray? We didn't really port DORE, we just installed and compiled it on our SUN 3/260. Sun provides the CXP option (graphics accelerator) fro some workstations. Ours is a GP+, although they(Ardent) only had experience with the GP2. GP+ and GP2 are types of CXP, as I understand it. So, it works fine if you have either of these. However, if you have no CXP, then all you can use is the raytracer option, not the quick renderer. In other words the quick (they call it dynamic) renderer requires the CXP. Now, if all you want is the raytracer, you're in luck. After compiling the code using a GP2 flag which they provide in the makefile(even though we had a GP+) we tried using the raytracing option on a diskless sun 3/60 (color) which had the other Sun mounted over NFS. It worked! So even if you compile DORE on a machine with a CXP, you can run the raytracer on a machine without it, using the same demo program that was compiled on the CXP machine. The other question which we have now is if the raytracer is using the 68881 floating point accelerator on the machine. We don't know. Probably not. All I can say is that we have made some really neat pictures writing our own programs with DORE on the SUn. The sphere primitive is especially helpful since we have alot of molecular modelling applications. As we see it, the draw back is not being able to run the less expensive(computationally) renderers on machines which have no CXP. The SUn CXP's do things like shading and transformations for you, but it would also be nice to get software for doing that if you do not have hardware accelerators. It might still be slow, but faster than raytracing. Hope that helps :-). - Jesse