Open Agent Engine: Now in 64-bit

I had a bit of a setback with my Open Agent Engine work when I switched to my new Macbook Pro. OpenMCL is only available on Intel as a 64-bit application, which means that none of the Cocoa (and other frameworks) are available in Mac OS X (Tiger). As announced in the WWDC 2007 keynote, the full set of frameworks will be available as 64-bit frameworks in Mac OS X (Leopard) which means that everyone will finally get to play with all of this stuff in a few weeks when Leopard is in general release.

As I was working through the changes needed to use more Cocoa and CGL routines (rather than Carbon and AGL), I started to get interested in Quartz Composer, and how it might be used to visualize data in 3D. To get an idea of baseline OpenGL performance, I mocked up a few simple clouds of data to see how rapidly the data could be displayed and examined (via fly-overs and zooming).

My first cut was using OpenGL vertices as points. I could only display about 2 Million points before performance got too slow to display with any meaningful feedback (first image).

The data could be zoomed in to see details of the individual points, but nothing was in color.

I then changed the implementation to use small spheres to represent the points in the file. Now the data showed color, but the image was much slower -- I had to drop the point size down to no more than 20 thousand points.

Even 20 thousand points it probably too much for real interactive use, but it is at least sufficient for actual examination of the data. With a MacPro or faster system (perhaps next year!) there should be little if any problem viewing such data.

Now, it's on to a Quartz Composer implementation.