May 8, 2002

6.338J/18.337J Project Final Report

We have completed our project by providing three new commands to MATLAB*P visualization package: ppspy, ppsurf and ppmesh. These three commands correspond to ordinary MATLAB spy, surf and mesh commands.
Unlike spy, surf and mesh which require all the matrix data to be located on the main display node, ppspy, ppsurf and ppmesh keep the data on their respective nodes rendering them in parallel and then sending only the pixel data of rendered images to the main node. Thus, the data transfer between the cluster nodes and the main display node is made independent of the size of the data that is being plotted. This allows for a significant execution speed increase when plotting large distributed matrices.
We have designed our own graphical user interface (GUI) using Matlab GUIDE. We tried to make it as natural to the user as possible by providing zooming (for ppspy) as well as rotation interface for ppsurf and ppmesh commands. In addition user can print or export the figures to various image formats.

  1. The GUI
  2. Interfacing with MATLAB*P
  3. Rendering
  4. Results
  5. Source code