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Warning!

Puhti and Mahti are being decommissioned in stages, and their storage areas will become fully unavailable from 15 October 2026. Clean up unnecessary files and move any data you need to keep by 31 August 2026. See the Roihu data migration guide for instructions on transferring your data to Roihu.

Puhti scratch is very full: keep only active data there and move or delete everything else. No new Puhti scratch quota will be granted.

CloudCompare

CloudCompare is an open source tool for editing and processing dense 3D point clouds (such as those acquired with laser scanners).

The main purpose of CloudCompare on Puhti is to serve as a tool for visualizing point cloud data.

Available

The following versions of CloudCompare are available:

  • CloudCompare 2.14 for CPU partitions In Roihu. GPU version for Roihu is coming later.
  • CloudCompare 2.12.4 for GPU partitions. Plugins: qEDL, qPDALIO, qAnimation and qPCV. In Puhti.
  • CloudCompare 2.10.3 for CPU partitions with more plugins than the GPU version. In Puhti.

GPU version is faster, but consumes GPU Billing Units instead of CPU Billing Units (see Billing for details). Also queues to GPU partitions may be longer.

Usage

CloudCompare is available in web interface: Puhti or Roihu.

GPU-accelerated CloudCompare

GPU-accelerated CloudCompare is available with Accelerated visualization app

Basic CloudCompare

Basic CloudCompare is available via Desktop app. After launching the remote desktop, double-click CloudCompare/ccViewer icon OR open Terminal (Desktop icon) and start CloudCompare:

module load cloudcompare
CloudCompare

License

CloudCompare is published under the GNU General Public License.

You are free to use CloudCompare for any purpose, including commercially or for education.

Citation

CloudCompare (version 2.10.3) [GPL software]. (2021). Retrieved from http://www.cloudcompare.org.

If you used a CloudCompare plugin, also cite the plugin authors.

Acknowledgement

Please acknowledge CSC and Geoportti in your publications, it is important for project continuation and funding reports. As an example, you can write "The authors wish to thank CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland (urn:nbn:fi:research-infras-2016072531) and the Open Geospatial Information Infrastructure for Research (Geoportti, urn:nbn:fi:research-infras-2016072513) for computational resources and support".

Installation

CloudCompare was installed to Puhti with Apptainer. The basic version was installed using this CloudCompare Apptainer definition file.

References