Computing Cloud Rendering with Processing and Amazon EC2

This project is my first experiment with using Amazon EC2 for cloud rendering. The source code is all there and I'll post detailed instructions on how to use it later, but here is a speeded up video of the output:

Computing Cloud Rendering from binarymillenium on Vimeo.

It looks kind of cool, but not too exciting- but there's potential for better things.

What I've done is launched several compute instances on EC2, where worker nodes create individual lines seen in the plots, and then pass data back to a head node, which creates the plots, puts them on a web page for real-time feedback, and stores all the frames for retrieval at the end of the run.

The plots are aggregations of all the results, blue is the presence of any line, and white is a high density of lines, and greenish tinge signifies the line was from a recently aggregated set. It's interesting because the more lines are aggregated, the less the plot changes, so it becomes increasingly boring.

All the plotting and data generation is done using java applications exported from Processing. 3D graphics are also possible, and something like this earlier video could be ported to the scripts I've made. There is no graphics card accessible on the EC2 machines, but virtual frame buffer software like Xvfb and software rendering (either Processing's P3D or software opengl) make it possible to trick the application into thinking there is.

It's not distributed rendering since all the rendering is on one computer, but I think I need to distribute the rendering in order to speed it up.

There is potential for more dynamic applications, involving user interaction through webpages, or simulations that interact with the results of previous simulations, and communicate with other nodes to alter what they are doing.

Save Image As And Close Tab Firefox Addon

I haven't made a firefox addon before, but I thought I'd try something simple: combine the context menu "Save Image As..." with closing the current tab. My contribution consists of putting these two lines together:

gContextMenu.saveImage();
gBrowser.removeCurrentTab();


To start out with I used the Firefox/Thunderbird Extension Wizard. Initially I didn't select the 'Create context menu item' and that may have caused problems with gContextMenu not being defined - it was either that or the fact I was trying to embed the commands into the firefoxOverlay.xul file as embedded javascript instead of putting it in the overlay.js file.

I found the first function by looking through the firefox source code first for the menuitem name of the function "Save Image As", and from there finding saveImage. The removeCurrentTab function was harder to find, but this addon provided source code that showed it: Stephen Clavering's CTC.

Tutorial pages I initially found about extension development were helpful, but I didn't see anything that talks about mozilla fundamentals- probably I need to find a book about it.

This addon goes well with the Menu Editor and Download Sort.

There is code in the real Save Image As for determining whether an image is being selected or not (my addon shows up regardless) I should add in next, and there should be logic that prevents the close action if the save as was canceled (less sure how to do that).

Quick jmatio in Processing example

1. Download jmatio from mathworks file exchange
2. unzip and put contents in folder called jmatio
3. rename lib dir to library
3. rename library/jamtio.jar to library/jmatio.jar
4. create a mat file in the sketch data dir called veh_x.mat which contains an array called veh_x
5. Run the following code:


import com.jmatio.io.*;
import com.jmatio.types.*;

MatFileReader mfr = null;
try {
mfr = new MatFileReader(sketchPath + "/data/veh_x.mat" );
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
exit();
}

if (mfr != null) {
double[][] data = ((MLDouble)mfr.getMLArray( "veh_x" )).getArray();

println(data.length +" " + data[0].length + " " + data[0][0]);

}



TBD use getContents instead of requiring the mat file name and array name be the same.