The PolyViz Viewer displaying three polyhedra.

“PolyViz is a tool for visualizing n-dimensional polyhedra. Motivated by the difficulty of reasoning about the iteration spaces of nested loops with many levels, PolyViz allows users to visualize polyhedral representations of those iteration spaces.”

- PolyViz Sourceforge project description

I started writing PolyViz for an advanced high performance computing (HPC) course last spring (early 2010). The course focused on the polyhedral model, a way of thinking about tightly nested loops in computer programs as geometric shapes. In the polyhedral model, each loop has an index variable, like in a standard for loop, such as i, j or k. Each index variable iterates over a range of values, this set of values is called its domain. Each index variable is interpreted as a dimension of the polyhedron. Values that are included in the domain are within the polyhedron, all other values are not.

PolyViz on Sourceforge – See the files section to download source packages or the manual, which is very good and covers background materials and the mathematics involved, along with instructions on how to use the software. (more…)

This blog has been quiet the over the past year. With this post I’m officially putting the Sanguis project out to pasture indefinitely. I have not worked on the project this past year and I do not expect to come back to it. That said, I’ve been very busy on other projects (and university) and some projects that began as university projects. I had been hesitant to write about my other projects here, because they weren’t Cutthroat Studios projects (in other words, they weren’t Sanguis related). But with the realisation that I won’t be coming back to Sanguis, Cutthroat Studios needs a new project. And I have a few just waiting in line.

Games and graphics are what brought me to programming. They’re what brought me to computers. I still have a deep interest in graphics, and that interest shows in the projects I’ve chosen to take on recently. That said, my interests have expanded as I’ve been introduced to more facets of computer science. (more…)