RAS functional overview
From EGEE-see WIki
RAS is a generic infrastructure grid service for rendering animations and visualization in science. The main aim of the service is to help users to animate and visualize its applications output results. RAS uses fast animation rendering at the grid infrastructure based on POV-Ray (Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer) with the ability to produce output in a user defined specific format. One of the goals of the service is to reduce the necessary grid knowledge on users’ part to minimum by reducing the number of commands needed to operate. The users can take advantage of POV-Ray Scene Description Language and produce high quality images and animations previously rendered only on commercial clusters and expensive proprietary software. The RAS service is supporting height fields, isosurfaces, 2D and 3D raster and vector maps, as well as atmospheric effects.
The model was designed to automatically adjust certain variables (using heuristics), giving them sensible values within a reasonable range of input parameters, relieving the burden from the experimentator, and allowing him to concentrate on variation of actual and crucial model parameters. It seemed as a rational and logical step to enable modeling and achieving representative results even for users who are not the experts in POV-Ray SDL, broadening the range of potential users
Effects on the grid infrastructure
- Fast and effective visualisation of application’s output data
- Easy load balance and better usage of idle processors because of numerous small sequential jobs that can fill the gap/idle processors
