GeoViS - General relativistic ray tracing in 4D spacetimes

Current contact:
Dr. Thomas Müller
Haus der Astronomie/Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
69117 Heidelberg, Germany
Email: tmueller [at] mpia.de

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Contents:

• Description
• Requirements
• Installation with cmake
• Run example

Description

GeoViS is a code for general relativistic ray tracing in four-dimensional Lorentzian spacetimes.

Requirements

• GeoViS is based on the Motion4D library

• As the Motion4D library has some integrators taken from the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL), you also need GSL: http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/

• Standard output of images is in the ppm-Format. If you have tiff or png available, you can also compile GeoViS with the corresponding libraries.

Install GeoViS with cmake

1. Generate subdirs:

    mkdir -p build/Debug 
    mkdir -p build/Release
   

2. Enter e.g. build/Release folder

3. ccmake ../.. <= Please note the extra c in ccmake !!!

   Press 'c' to configure.

   Adjust the build variables:

     CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE   Release
     GSL_DIR            /path/to/gsl
     GSL_LIB_DIR        /path/to/gsl/lib
     M4D_ROOT_DIR       /absolute/path/to/m4d/
     MPI_AVAILABLE      ON or OFF
     MPI_DIR            /path/to/mpi
     MPI_LIB_DIR        /path/to/mpi/lib
   

   If you have png library available

     PNG_AVAILABLE      ON
     PNG_INC_DIR       /path/to/png/include
     PNG_LIB_DIR       /path/to/png/lib
   

   If you have tiff library available

     TIFF_AVAILABLE     ON
     TIFF_INC_DIR       /path/to/tiff/include
     TIFF_LIB_DIR       /path/to/tiff/lib
   

   If you have tiff and/or png in the standard paths, you do not have to set the INC and LIB paths.

   Press 'c' and 'g'.

4. make

Run example

To run an example, open a command line and switch into the GeoViS folder. Then, write

    ./gvsRender[d] examples/sphereAroundBlackhole.scm sphere.ppm

If you have MPI available and a multi-CPU machine, you can also use the parallel renderer. E.g. with 8 CPU:

    mpirun -np 8 ./gvsRenderPar -tasks 24 -renderdev 0 examples/sphereAroundBlackhole.scm sphere.ppm

The parallel rendering adds an image number to each output image, e.g.: sphere_0.ppm