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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 computing services have been decommissioned and no new jobs are accepted or executed on its compute nodes. Puhti login nodes and storage services are planned to remain available until 15 October 2026.

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 in Roihu:

  • CloudCompare 2.14 for CPU. Plugins: Core I/O, LAS I/O.
  • CloudCompare 2.13.1 for GPU. Plugins: Core I/O, Animation, EDL Shader, PCV / ShadeVis, PDAL.

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: Roihu.

After launching the remote desktop, start CloudCompare or ccViewer from Applications (upper-left corner) -> Geosciences.

Alternatively, open a terminal from Applications -> Terminal emulator:

module load cloudcompare
CloudCompare

Spatial datasets at CSC computing environment

Roihu has hundreds of Finnish spatial datasets available locally, additionally there is more in Allas and cPouta. More info under Spatial data in CSC computing environment

License

CloudCompare is published under the GNU General Public License.

Citation

CloudCompare (version 2.X.Y) [GPL software]. (2026). 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 with Apptainer. The CPU-versions were installed using Apptainer and wrapped with Tykky

wrap-container -w /usr/bin/CloudCompare,/usr/bin/ccViewer cc.sif --prefix 2.14

References