___________________________________________________________________ FAQ Frequently Asked Questions of the International AVS Center North Carolina Supercomputing Center ___________________________________________________________________ Questions answered in this file : --------------------------------- 1. What is the International AVS Center ? 2. Where is the International AVS Center ? 3. What is AVS ? 4. Where can I get more information on AVS ? 5. What are the system requirements to run AVS ? 6. How do I download modules from the International AVS Center, or submit modules, or get a list of the currently available modules ? 7. When I try to run AVS on a remote machine and display the output on an X server, I get a message saying Client unauthorized to connect to server. How do I fix this ? 8. Is there sample AVS data available ? 9. When I try to ftp to avs.ncsc.org, I get terminated before I get connected. What am I doing wrong ? 10. What is the procedure to add a question to this FAQ file ? 11. Why should I submit a module to the International AVS Center ? 12. Where can I find more information on AVS in published literature ? 13. What is WAIS ? 14. Are there courses being offered on AVS ? ___________________________________________________________________ 1. What is the International AVS Center ? The International AVS Center serves as a catalyst for expanding the AVS user base and for increasing AVS functionality by fostering discipline-specific module development and new AVS uses. Located at the North Carolina Supercomputing Center, the worldwide clearinghouse collects, ports, and distributes user-contributed, public-domain modules and acts as liason between users and vendors. The International AVS Center also publishes a quarterly magazine called AVS Network News and a yearly module catalog. It also hosts the yearly International AVS User Group conference and coordinates User Group activities. The AVS Consortium is made up of eight AVS vendors who are funding and providing direction for the International AVS Center. The eight vendors are Advanced Visual Systems Inc., CONVEX Computer Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, Hewlett Packard Company, Kubota Pacific, Sun Microsystems, and Wavetracer, Inc. ___________________________________________________________________ 2. Where is the International AVS Center ? The International AVS Center is located at the North Carolina Supercomputing Center. The anonymous ftp site for the center is located on the internet at avs.ncsc.org with an IP address of 128.109.178.23 . The main email alias for the center is avs@ncsc.org . ___________________________________________________________________ 3. What is AVS ? Using anonymous ftp to avs.ncsc.org, you can then get the file avs_readme/WHAT_IS_AVS. Take a look at this file for a good summary of what AVS does. ___________________________________________________________________ 4. Where can I get more information on AVS ? If this file and other files available via anonymous ftp to avs.ncsc.org do not answer your questions, you can send mail to avs@ncsc.org. The International AVS Center will do its best to help you out. You also may want to monitor and/or post articles to the Internet newsgroup comp.graphics.avs, which has an ongoing dialog between various AVS users. Or you can contact AVS Inc. directly at: FOR AVS PRICING OR OTHER SALES SITUATIONS (if you don't have AVS): Advanced Visual Systems Inc. 300 Fifth Ave. Waltham, MA 02154 USA Tel: 617-890-4300 Fax: 617-890-8287 Email: info@avs.com FOR AVS SUPPORT (if you already have AVS): Advanced Visual Systems Inc. 300 Fifth Ave. Waltham, MA 02154 USA Tel: 1-800-428-7001 Tel: 617-890-4300 Fax: 617-890-8287 Email: support@avs.com ___________________________________________________________________ 5. What are the system requirements to run AVS ? Numerous people have requested AVS configuration information. This information changes regularly and you should contact either AVS Inc at 617-890-4300, your local vendor reps or AVS Inc reps for additional information. CONVEX - Available now - CONVEX OSV9.1 or later release, CONVEX OS Utilities 9.1 or later, CONVEX OS Internet Services V9.1 or later, IEEE floating point hardware. Requires approximately 90MB disk space, and a color display device networked to your CONVEX system supporting X window System Version 11 Release 4 color server, which supports either a PSEUDOCOLOR or TRUECOLOR visual type, or a Silicon Graphics workstation running IRIX 4.0 or a workstation or terminal with a PEX server. DEC - Available now - DEC AVS V3.0 generates PEX V4.0 protocol (when displaying to a PEX V4.0 cpable display server), and is compatible with ULTRIX V4.2 which includes a PEX V4.0 server. ULTRIX V4.2A includes a PEX V5.0 server. For compatiblitiy with that server, DEC AVS V3.0A has been released. Note that PEX V5.0 provides (two pass) transparency. Also note that the ULTRIX V4.2A distribution does include a PEX compatibility kit which is essentially a PEX V4.0 server. There is no support for runing both PEX V4.0 and PEX V5.0 servers concurrently. Only one such server can be run at any one time. Hewlett-Packard - Available now - HP 9000 series 700, CRX graphics (call for information on other graphic configurations), OS release 8.01 or later ( 'uname -r' to get OS level), Phigs runtime will be required for systems using H/W rendering, 16 MB memory minimum, 32 MB recommended, installation uses about 40 MB disk, CRX will use the S/W renderer ( others will support H/W rendering when appropriate), monochrome is not supported. IBM - Available now - RS6000 workstations, models 3xx, 5xx or 7xx, 8-bit Color Graphics Display adapter, High Performance 3D 24-bit Color Graphics Processor with Z buffer option, GTO 3D 24-bit Graphics adapter with Z buffer (a.k.a. Supergraphics Subsystem), (call for information on other graphic configurations), AIX release 3.1.5 w/2006 patch tape and APAR#: a19758 (X server), use command 'lslpp -h bos.obj' which should show release 03.01.0006.0008 as active, use command 'lsdev -C -c adapter' to see graphics configuration, 16 MB memory minimum, 32 MB recommended, installation uses about 40 MB disk, hardware rendering is only on 24-bit Z buffered systems, specify SW renderer on all systems without 24-bit Z buffering, AIX 3.1.5 X server is limited to 8-bit pseudocolor visuals, images are then dithered. SUN - Available now - Sun SPARC workstations 1, 1+, 2 supporting the sun4/sun4c applications architecture, 8-bit frame buffers (GX, CG3, etc), GS and GT graphics after OpenWindows version 3 is available from Sun ( first quarter 92), Sun OS 4.1.1 w/ 100299-01 patch or later, use command /usr/etc/showrev to get revision levels, 8-bit frame buffers require OpenWindows version 2 with X server installed, 16 MB minimum, 24 or 32 MB recommended, installation uses about 38 MB disk, strongly recommend increasing shared memory segment and swap space size per release notes, 8-bit graphics boards ( GX, CG3, etc) always uses S/W renderer, H/W rendering systems will use XGL graphics, S/W render also available Wavetracer - to provide users with logical and uniform access to Wavetracer's three-dimensional and massively parallel Data Transport Computer (DTC) and advanced software tools, AVS modules are currently being ported to make use of the DTC. The DTC is a three dimensional, massively parallel computer. It has a 3D computing architecture, high data capacity and bandwidth, high I/O bandwidth, ultra finegrained parallellism and low cost of ownership. It easily connects to a host UNIX workstation via an industry-standard SCSI interface. The processing resources of the DTC are integrated into the host's software and network environment by multiC, a powerful data-parallel extension of ANSI C. ___________________________________________________________________ 6. How do I download modules from the International AVS Center, or submit modules, or get a list of the currently available modules ? There is an AVS_README file which should answer these and many other questions for you. To obtain a copy of this file, there are two methods currently available and a third method under development. Mail sent to avsemail@ncsc.org will automatically retrieve a response which includes the AVS_README file and also a current module catalog. Or you can ftp to avs.ncsc.org, login with anonymous as your userid and your own userid as the password, and get the AVS_README file and the AVS_CATALOG file from there. For those users without ftp capability, there is a tape ordering system being developed at the International AVS Center. ___________________________________________________________________ 7. When I try to run AVS on a remote machine and display the output on an X server, I get a message saying Client unauthorized to connect to server. How do I fix this ? The xhost command will let your server know its OK for your remote machine to display there. In the file read in when you boot up X (for example, on a Titan .xsession, on a Sun .xinitrc), add the line: xhost ... ___________________________________________________________________ 8. Is there sample AVS data available ? Using anonymous ftp to avs.ncsc.org, you can then cd to AVS_SAMP_DATA. This directory is for sample data that has been donated without any modules. No tests have been made on this data, so use it at your own risk. This is simply to allow you to get your hands on a variety of different data types for experimentation purposes. ___________________________________________________________________ 9. When I try to ftp to avs.ncsc.org, I get terminated before I get connected. What am I doing wrong ? Possibly your host machine isn't a registered internet site. In such a case, the IP address can't be mapped by our machine into a valid hostname. Speak to the person in charge of your network about making sure it is correctly registered. ___________________________________________________________________ 10. What is the procedure to add a question to this FAQ file ? Please submit your suggestion for this FAQ file via email to avs@ncsc.org. Your question and answer will quite possibly show up in this file shortly thereafter. ___________________________________________________________________ 11. Why should I submit a module to the International AVS Center ? Donating a module to the International AVS Center benefits the entire AVS user community by facilitating further use of AVS to visualize complex scientific phenomena. Any module that is not donated may be rewritten elsewhere - wasting someone's valuble time - hindering further development of other module capabilities for everyone's benefit. ___________________________________________________________________ 12. Where can I find more information on AVS in published literature ? Here is a short (no doubt incomplete!) reference list: Upson, Craig, Thomas Faulhaber, Jr., David Kamins, David Laidlaw, David Schlegel, Jeffrey Vroom, Robert Gurwitz and Andries van Dam. "The Application Visualization System: A Computational Environment for Scientific Visualization." IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (July 1989), Vol.9, No.4, pp 30-42. Currington, I., Coutant, M., "AVS - A Flexible Interactive Distributed Environment for Scientific Visualisation Applications", Second Eurographics Workshop on Visualization in Scientific Computing, April, 1991 VandeWettering, "The Application Visualization System - AVS 2.0", PIXEL, July/August, 1990 Garrity, M., "Raytracing Irregular Volume Data", San Diego Workshop on Volume Visualization, Dec, 1990 Gelberg, L., Kamins, D., Vroom, J., "VEX: A Volume Exploratorium", Chapel Hill Workshop on Volume Visualization, May 1989 Gelberg, L., et al, "Visualization Techniques for Structured and Unstructured Scientific Data", Course Notes, SIGGRAPH '90 Course "State of the Art in Data Visualization" Mathias, C., "Visualization Techniques Augment Research into Structure of Adenovirus", Scientific Computing & Automation, April, 1991 Parker, D., Lin, Y., "The Application Visualization System for Finite Element Analysis", Banff Conference on FEA, May, 1990 Upson, C., "Scientific Visualization Environments for the Computational Sciences", Proceedings of the 34th IEEE Computer Society International Conference - Spring, 1989 Craig Upson, "Tools for Creating Visions," UNIX REVIEW, Vol.8, No.8, pp. 39-47. Calvert, Brian "Interactive Analysis of Multidimensional Data", Masters Thesis University of Illinois Department of Computer Science, 1991. ___________________________________________________________________ 13. What is WAIS ? There is now a WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) server running at the International AVS Center. WAIS allows a user to ask a question to a server, which provides a ranked list of documents that may help answer that question. The user can then peruse through the documents that seem useful. All of the .txt files for AVS modules freely available on the International AVS Center's anonymous ftp site have been indexed, as well as informational files such as AVS_README and FAQ. WAIS should prove more and more useful as the AVS module repository becomes larger. It provides a convienient interface to large amounts of data. There is also an archive of all postings to comp.graphics.avs beginning with May 1992. For a more thorough discussion of WAIS and how you can use it to peruse the files at the International AVS Center, please check the file WHAT_IS_WAIS on avs.ncsc.org. ___________________________________________________________________ 14. Are there courses being offered on AVS ? Courses on AVS are currently offered by several organizations: Advanced Visual Systems, Inc. (617) 890-4300 Developers Only Clarity Learning (800) 231-0081 North Carolina Supercomputing Center (919) 248-1100 Scientific Visualization Associates (508) 371-2923 These courses may be offered either onsite at your facility or theirs, depending on the arrangement that is set up. Please contact these companies for further information.