Hardware and Software Requirements

The 3DVDM system should work on any hardware compatible with Linux/IRIX. Note though that the software is computation and graphical resource intensive. For the exploration of large datasets (containing several million observations) we recommend 512MB memory, a fast graphical card, and a state-of-the-art CPU.

To install the 3DVDM System you basically need a standard Linux installation that includes support for the development libraries for OpenGL, GTK, lam/mpi and GNU Scientific Library. For example, on a Debian GNU/Linux system one needs to install the following packages: lam4-dev, freeglut3-dev, libtiff4-dev, libXmu-dev, libgtk1.2-dev. Installation of these packages can be done with the following command:

# apt-get install lam4-dev freeglut3-dev lam-runtime \
    libtiff4-dev libXmu-dev libgtk1.2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgsl0-dev

Efficient implementation of the OpenGL libraries should be installed on your system in order to provide real time navigation (rotation, zoom in/out) in visualizations. Some commercial graphical card manufacturers like nvidia and ati provide such binary OpenGL libraries. which use 3D hardware acceleration. However, not all vendors of fast graphical cards provide efficient implementations of OpenGL libraries in Linux. In this case a software emulation (mesa3D) should be used instead. This significantly reduces rendering speed of the visualizations, since all the computations are done by the main CPU of the computer.