Superconductor
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Get Superconductor view and create visualizations

Caution

Superconductor is currently available as a developer preview. We want to give you an early look at what we're up to, but there are still a lot of rough spots. We're hard at work on development, and are constantly fixing bugs and adding new features.

If you want to get started viewing or creating Superconductor visualizations, you're in the right place. The instructions below will walk you through downloading and installing Superconductor for yourself.

Requirements

The developer preview of Superconductor currently only supports the following platform:

  • An Apple laptop/desktop computer
  • Mac OS X 10.8 ('Mountain Lion') or newer
  • An NVIDIA (preferred) or ATI graphics chip available in your computer

Support for more platforms is a high priority, and we're working hard to add that to Superconductor.

Downloading

The Superconductor code includes everything you need to create your own visualizations. If you just want to view visualizations, it's not strictly necessary. However, it does include a number of demo visualizations to try out.

The best way to obtain a copy of the code is to clone our our GitHub repo. This will give you the latest copy of Superconductor, and allow you to keep up to date with a git pull.

You can also download a snapshot of the latest version of our code from GitHub here.

Viewing Visualizations

Underneath the hood, Superconductor uses the power of WebCL and WebGL to unleash your GPU to run big, interactive visualizations. To view Superconductor visualizations, you'll need a web browser which supports both together.

At present, WebCL is right on the bleeding edge of web standards, and so the only browser we are aware of which supports both WebCL and WebGL together is Samsung's WebKit-WebCL for Mac OS X. As WebCL matures, we hope to see wider browser support. We are also actively working on alternatives for when WebCL isn't available.

To get and run WebKit-WebCL:

  1. If you don't already have it, install Command Line Tools for Xcode from within Xcode's preferences (preferred), or from here.
  2. Clone Samsung's WebKit-WebCL GitHub repo.
  3. In a Terminal window, cd to the root of the cloned repo and run ./Tools/Scripts/build-webkit,
  4. Run the WebCL-enabled version of Safari with ./Tools/Scripts/run-safari

Warning You will need to use the run-safari script from WebKit-WebCL every time you want to launch WebCL-enabled Safari. Running Safari without using the script will launch the normal version of Safari, without WebCL support.

You can test WebCL is enabled by opening the ./Examples/WebCL/Hello/index.html page included in WebKit-WebCL; you should see a message like "Computed 1014/1024 correct values" (it's OK if not all values were correct in this demo.)

For more information on viewing the included Superconductor demo visualizations, see the demo page.

Creating Visualizations

Instructions coming soon!