Report: Supercomputing 2008 in Texas

Johan Berntsson, a software engineer for 3Di, Inc. presented his paper, "Scientific Computing with OpenSim," at a workshop with Intel and other companies and universities at the Supercomputing 2008 (SC08) event held in Austin, Texas on November 15 through 21, 2008.

Scientific Computing

There has long been an interest in virtual reality to display and manipulate simulations. However, OpenSim has unique properties compared to traditional virtual reality systems which enables new kinds of applications. The main difference is that OpenSim allows collaboration, in that many avatars share the same space, and are able to talk to each other (either by voice chat or messaging), look at objects and videos together, and move around using realistic physics to disallow people from occupying the same space. The contents of the world can either be created directly by the avatars while running the application, or by importing existing models from other 3D design software. The objects in the world can be controlled by scripts, and various visual effects, such as various particle system algorithms, can be used to display physical phenomena.

SC08

For the Super Computing 2008 conference (SC08), 3Di wrote a paper called Scientific Computing with OpenSim. Furthermore, we have written a module that makes it possible to connect OpenSim with an external physics server. We also produced a video that demonstrates how to create OpenSim regions that connect to external applications.

ScienceSim and SC09

We will continue to work with scientific computing applications in 2009, in collaboration with ScienceSim and partners such as Intel. Our primary interest is to prepare at least one pilot project for the SC09 conference in Portland, where 3D Internet will be one of the main focus areas.

References and resources

* Scientific Computing with OpenSim, Johan Berntsson (3Di Inc), 2008 [PDF file]

* ExtSim : an external simulator bridge for OpenSim

* Video demonstrating ExtSim and VNC [long][short]