Report: Supercomputing in Texas

Johan Berntsson, a software engineer presented his paper, "Scientific Computing with OpenSim," at a workshop with Intel and other companies and universities at the Supercomputing (SC08) event held in Austin, Texas.

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(SC08) conference, 3Di wrote a paper called Scientific Computing with OpenSim. He also wrote a module that makes it possible to connect OpenSim to an external physics server. There is also a video that demonstrates how to create OpenSim regions that connect to external applications.

ScienceSim and SC09

A major interest is to prepare at least one pilot project for the SC09 conference in Portland, where the 3D Internet will be one of the main areas of focus.