Post #2098607
2026-03-27 17:56 UTC
In light of this, we got to thinking... "what if we could just make our big supercomputing code directly produce output images?" If we could do that, maybe we could wire up xv on the back-end of it and turn it into a cheap "visualization platform."
The only problem with this is that we were working on the Connection Machine. I wasn't aware of a vis/graphics library that we could use for this. And whatever we used, it would have to be extremely lightweight due to memory concerns. 16/n?
Replies (1)
-
@dabeaz@mastodon.social 2026-03-27 18:00
In physics, you often see people making "crazy" approximations. For example, "sin(x)" is basically the same as "x" for certain values of "x". A trick you can sometimes use to simplify some gnarly integral. In terms of graphics, we were mostly making rendered spheres. A first-order approximation to an antialiased rendered fancy sphere is a plain 2D solid-colored circle with a single pixel black outline around it. So, maybe we should just do that. 17/n?