WinSAGE (Windows Display Wall Software)
Image left: WinSAGE at SuperComputing 2007; Image right: WinSAGE at Calit2, UC San Diego.
SAGE
is a graphics streaming architecture for supporting high-resolution, scalable
and collaborative scientific visualization environments with potentially
hundreds of megapixel of contiguous display resolution. It is primarily
designed to be run as a thin middleware on cluster driven tile-displays. It
allows users to treat the high-resolution distributed displays as one
contiguous desktop where users can move/resize application windows. SAGE is
network centric and the applications running on these displays need not run
locally. The applications can be run on remote machines or clusters and can
stream their pixel framebuffers to SAGE enabled tile-displays.
The
group responsible for the core development is at the Electronic Visualization
Laboratory at the
This
webpage supports the Windows 32-bit versions of software used for building and
configuring scalable tile-displays. The Windows port was done at the National
Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research under a grant by Microsoft Research.
The software has been tested on Windows XP based tile-displays driven by a
high-bandwidth backplane (1Gpbs) and bundles in SAGE application
binaries/source for remote presentation, large 2D/3D dataset visualization and
HD video playback and streaming amongst others.
Installation
Instructions on how to
install and configure software and hardware can be found here: Building Windows
Viz-Walls. Users are highly encouraged to go through the documentation
before starting their installs. Following are the steps and explanation of the
SAGE install.
Step 1 : Download the SAGE setup zip file from the website. Unzip the files into a
directory and run SAGE_setup.exe.
Step 2: The setup will guide you through either a master node
install or tile node install. You have to do at least one master node install.
Choose a network mounted directory for the destination. This directory should
be visible under the same path on all the machines (master and tiles).
Typically this path may look like Z:\sage\. Do the tile node install on all
machines you wish to use for displaying SAGE. It’s possible to install master
and tile node on the same machine however this is usually redundant and usually
done for testing.
Step 3: Reboot all the machines to make sure it works. To
verify that the SAGE remote execution daemons are running in the back ground on
all the tiles, run Start -> SAGE -> Test Connection to Tiles. You should
see a status window open on all the tile nodes. If you see these, the
installation was successful and SAGE can spawn processes across the cluster. If
these daemons are not running, SAGE will not work.
Step 4: SAGE has configuration files that need to be
created/edited before you can run anything. Go to Start -> SAGE and run
“Configure SAGE”. This utility will allow you to create a .tcfg file for your
tile display. Make sure to enter correct IP addresses for all tiles and the
master node and then save the .tcfg file and enable it using the “Save and Use
Configuration in SAGE” button. Some sample .tcfg files can be viewed through
the utility too.
Step 5: If you created a valid tile-config, you should be
able to launch/stop SAGE using the “Start Sage” and “Stop SAGE” commands in the
Start -> SAGE menu. The command will launch processes on all tile nodes and
then give you an option for connecting to a live SAGE session. For controlling
the local SAGE session, choose the hostname of your master node from the list
that pops up.
Step 6: Once SAGE is running, you can go to Start -> SAGE
-> Applications and start SAGE applications. The placement/size of the
applications can be done through the SAGE UI. To stop applications, simply
close their windows and their representative windows under SAGE UI.
Extra steps needed for some applications
- For the movie player (VLC), the video output
plug-in needs to be set to “OpenGL video output” to get it to work with
SAGE. For this go to “Settings” -> “Preferences” ->”Output modules”
and click on the “Advanced options” check box. This will allow out to choose
the output module for VLC. From the drop down box, pick “OpenGL video
output”. Save the settings and restart the movie player.
- If the “Image Viewer” application does not work,
install ImageMagick’s libraries (Q16 variant) on the head node.
- Some sample datasets/files can be downloaded from
the website to test the installation of Rasmol, Tiffviewer etc.
Downloads
1.
Binary (Win32 only)
SAGE v2.0 (Binaries install package)
SAGE v2.0 Source and VS2005 projects
2.
Sample datasets
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When acknowledging the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research in publications or presentations please cite the following:
"(Software Name)" presented here was produced at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research at San Diego, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through a National Center for Research Resources program grant P41 RR04050 awarded to Dr. Mark Ellisman.
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