BallRoom is a visualization tool for set of particles. It displays particles as balls (no sticks here), and uses a representation projected on two dimensions (no real 3D features like lights, shadows). On the other hand, it can easily handle several thousands particles, and within the above limitations you can do many things, among which animations, mapping of atomic properties on colors, cut samples, etc. BallRoom is more a convenient tool for the simulator to be used daily, rather than a system to produce striking images.
The current release is version 7.4, november 14, 1994.
This image was produced within a few minutes, starting from an existing data file containing coordinates and coordination data:
The picture was obtained by depositing a liquid aluminum droplet on a solid aluminum (111) surface close to the melting point, and waiting for equilibrium. The simulation sample is repeated four times using the box replication feature. The sample contains 19293 atoms, and the picture 77172. Colors are mapped on instantaneous atomic coordinations. F. Di Tolla, F. Ercolessi and E. Tosatti 1994. Abstract.
BallRoom is the result of a quite discontinuous development process across many different hardware/software platforms, started in 1984 and still going on. The development was driven by particular visualization needs within a molecular dynamics research line, and was therefore far from systematic or carefully planned. You may find some limitations here and there when using it for your work. BallRoom consists of about 9000 lines of Fortran code, and runs on GL-based workstations (Silicon Graphics, IBM RS6000), other systems supporting X-Windows (tested: HP 9000 Series 700, DEC AXP), Vax/VMS with GKS, IBM mainframes, and virtually every computer supports the Postscript-only version.
BallRoom is free software, and is distributed under
the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This means, of course, that there is NO WARRANTY of any kind.
More details can be found in the files
README and
COPYING.
The VOGL library used by the X-Windows version of BallRoom is Copyright of the University of Melbourne. I gratefully acknowledge Eric, Bernie, David and all the team for their efforts. The BallRoom distribution does not contain the full VOGL, but only a subset of it, unsuitable for other purposes. To use VOGL for your own programming project, please download the true original VOGL package.
Information is available in two files
README and
INSTALL
(also bundled with the tar file below).
To download, just choose between
and click.There is no formal registration. However I suggest to drop me a note if you start using BallRoom, so that I can insert your address in a mailing list which I use when a new release becomes available.
Desperate in evaluating machines for molecular dynamics? Look at the classic MDBNCH molecular dynamics benchmark, containing results for recent hardware and pointers to other useful benchmarking information.
Furio Ercolessi