RUNNING_DEMO.md

How to compile the demo

You will need the SDL2 library. If you are using Debian/Ubuntu it can be installed by entering these commands in the terminal:

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev

I recommend using Clang for compilation. If Clang is installed, it can be used by entering these commands before the next step:

export CC=/usr/bin/clang
export CXX=/usr/bin/clang++

Then to compile execute these commands from the root folder of the project (the same folder where CMakeLists.txt is located):

mkdir bin
cd bin
cmake .. && make demo -j4

Then you can start the demo by entering:

./demo example_tree_1

The animation being displayed can be controlled using keyboard. Hold left or right arrow key to rewind or to fast forward, press spacebar to pause/unpause and escape to exit.

Other executables

The folder demo/ also contains other targets. These can be compiled similarly by substituting demo for the target you want. All the targets can be build at once by entering:

cmake .. && make -j4

These are the phases of demo but split into multiple executables:

• generate -- generates and outputs an example dynamic graph, uses the same input arguments as demo does
• layout (or parallel_layout) -- takes three (or four) parameters -- (thread count) tolerance, width and height -- and produces a layout from text input it receives
• draw -- takes width and height and displays an animation

These can be chained together using pipes:

./generate example_tree_1 | ./layout 0.04 1024 640 | ./draw 1280 720

Example executable

The target example is built from the file demo/example.cpp which creates a simple dynamic graph layout and outputs it. To see an animation of the layout you can enter:

./example | ./draw 1280 720

Benchmarking

The folder also contains an executable named benchmark, which runs a given number of iterations and produces a table comparing performance for different sizes of an example dynamic graph.

./benchmark
./benchmark 10

Produced table compares three cases: tolerance = 0, tolerance > 0 and parallel implementation with tolerance > 0.

The number of threads to use can also be specified. For example, to use 8 threads you can enter:

./benchmark 10 8

Taking screenshots

Executable draw_states draws individual states as a series of .bmp images. It can be used the aforementioned way:

./example | ./draw_states  1280  720

Examples

As mentioned earlier, the two executables demo and generate accept the same arguments. You can use a predefined example, or you can use one of the generators provided.

./demo example_simple
./demo example_tree_2
./demo example_dense
./demo example_long
./demo gen_grid 8
./demo help # prints a list of accepted arguments