Record State for Rendering

At the end of the simulation loop the state of all of the objects is know and we make a record of the position and orientation (pose) of each object for rendering the movie on a graphics workstation. This was done so that the simulation could be run from only a terminal. In addition none of the parallel machine currently have any sophisticated graphic rendering capabilities such as OpenGL.

The output can be stored in an array and written to a file at the end of the simulation or written dynamically as the simulation progresses. In addition, if only the final pose of the objects is desired, these values can be tabulated over successive executions saving the time involed in recording all frames.

Since, again, each processor maintains a subset of all of the objects, all of the processors can, in parallel, record the object poses to either an internal array or files that can later be merged into a single movie file. Since the objects are local to each the processor, this proceeds in parallel without any need for communication.