ANARI_PTC (Pass-Through Compositing) Device

ANARI (https://registry.khronos.org/ANARI/specs/1.0/ANARI-1.0.html) is a Khonos Group-maintained API for cross-platform rendering. The repo provides an implementation that allows ANARI to be used for compositing-based data-parallel rendering, where multiple different MPI ranks each render their local data, in a ANARI-constent way.

For more details, plealse see

Standardized Data-Parallel Rendering Using ANARI
Ingo Wald, Stefan Zellmann, Jefferson Amstutz, Qi Wu, Kevin Griffin, Milan Jaros, Stefan Wesner
IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), 2024

(free PDF version available here https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00179)

Dependencies

This project requires

• a built and make installed ANARI_SDK (https://github.com/KhronosGroup/ANARI-SDK)
• cmake, c compiler, etc (which you already need for the ANARI SDK, anyway)
• when buiding the optional (GPU-compositing version): CUDA (if CUDA is disabled or cannot be found the project will automatically fall back to CPU compositing)
• when building the CPU version: tbb
• MPI development packages. When built with CUDA support you'll need a CUDA-aware MPI build; for the cpu-only version any MPI build should do.

Building

• Make sure to build and install the ANARI_SDK
• mkdir buildDir
• cd buildDir
• cmake .. (for default build) or
• `cmake -DPTC_DISABLE_CUDA .. (for explicitly cpu-only build

Installing

• just regular cmake make install ...

Using ANARI_PTC

Assuming you have a data-parallel application that already has a ANARI rendering path, just use this with ANARI_LIBRARY set to ptc

Contributors

Though the project lives under my github namespace (and all files bear my copyright headers), much of the latest version of the code is actually entirely credit-due to Jeff Amstutz - who always takes whatever duct-tape mess i've once written, burns it in a bonfire, and rewrites it in a much cleaner and more reliable way.

Related Projects

• ANARI-SDK (https://github.com/KhronosGroup/ANARI-SDK)
• barney (https://github.com/ingowald/barney)
• pynari (https://github.com/ingowald/pynari)
• VisRTX (https://github.com/NVIDIA/VisRTX)

Version History

v1.0.0

• first working version

v1.1.0

• added CI build
• fixed various config issues for different cmake/linux/gcc versions
• now properly builds even on systems that do not have cuda installed