Remote rendering of physic simulations and scalability aspects in web applications

Abstract: This thesis, assigned by Algoryx Simulation AB, explores the concept of implementing a web application for managing Algoryx based physics simulations. The application enables users to get access to the Algoryx simulation software by providing a user interface for clients to submit scenes files to be simulated, and to view a 3D visualization of the finished simulations rendered directly in the web browser. This allows clients to do away with the work of performing the compute intensive physic simulations locally and instead hand over that responsibility to the web service, while the client only needs to handle the actual rendering. Applications made available through a web browser allows users to get easy access to applications that does not require any installation procedures. For that reason the clients do not need any simulation software or any plugin installed to access the service. This makes it easy to share results of simulations to customers by just giving out a link that can be accessed through a browser. This paper also includes a theoretical study on scalability in web applications. The theory explains different ways of scaling, and common techniques and methods used to help achieving scalability that can be useful when designing and building scalable web system.