Results 1 - 10 of 22

WireGL: A Scalable Graphics System for Clusters

by Greg Humphreys, Matthew Eldridge, Ian Buck, Gordon Stoll, Matthew Everett, Pat Hanrahan - Computer Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 01 , 2001
"... We describe WireGL, a system for scalable interactive rendering on a cluster of workstations. WireGL provides the familiar OpenGL API to each node in a cluster, virtualizing multiple graphics accelerators into a sort-first parallel renderer with a parallel interface. We also describe techniques for ..."
Abstract - Cited by 130 (3 self) - Add to MetaCart
We describe WireGL, a system for scalable interactive rendering on a cluster of workstations. WireGL provides the familiar OpenGL API to each node in a cluster, virtualizing multiple graphics accelerators into a sort-first parallel renderer with a parallel interface. We also describe techniques for reassembling an output image from a set of tiles distributed over a cluster. Using flexible display management, WireGL can drive a variety of output devices, from standalone displays to tiled display walls. By combining the power of virtual graphics, the familiarity and ordered semantics of OpenGL, and the scalability of clusters, we are able to create time-varying visualizations that sustain rendering performance over 70,000,000 triangles per second at interactive refresh rates using 16 compute nodes and 16 rendering nodes.
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Lightning-2: A High-Performance Display Subsystem for PC Clusters

by Gordon Stoll, Matthew Eldridge, Dan Patterson, Art Webb, Steven Berman, Richard Levy, Chris Caywood, Milton Taveira, Stephen Hunt, Pat Hanrahan - Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2001 , 2001
"... Clusters of PCs are increasingly popular as cost-effective platforms for supercomputer-class applications. Given recent performance improvements in graphics accelerators, clusters are similarly attractive for demanding graphics applications. We describe the design and implementation of Lightning-2, ..."
Abstract - Cited by 47 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
Clusters of PCs are increasingly popular as cost-effective platforms for supercomputer-class applications. Given recent performance improvements in graphics accelerators, clusters are similarly attractive for demanding graphics applications. We describe the design and implementation of Lightning-2, a display subsystem for such a cluster. The system scales in both the number of rendering nodes and the number of displays supported, and allows any pixel data generated from any node to be dynamically mapped to any location on any display. A number of image-compositing functions are supported, including color-keying and depth-compositing. A distinguishing feature of the system is its platform independence: it connects to graphics accelerators via an industry-standard digital video port and requires no modifications to accelerator hardware or device drivers. As a result, rendering clusters that utilize Lightning-2 can be upgraded across multiple generations of graphics accelerators with little effort. We demonstrate a renderer that achieves 106 Mtri/s on an 8-node cluster using Lightning-2 to perform sortlast depth compositing. CR Categories: I.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware architecture—Parallel processing; I.3.2 [Computer Graphics]:
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Sort-last parallel rendering for viewing extremely large data sets on tile displays

by Kenneth Moreland, Brian Wylie, Constantine Pavlakos - In PVG ’01: Proceedings of the IEEE 2001 symposium on parallel and large-data visualization and graphics , 2001
"... Due to the impressive price-performance of today’s PCbased graphics accelerator cards, Sandia National Laboratories is attempting to use PC clusters to render extremely large data sets in interactive applications. This paper describes a sort-last parallel rendering system running on a PC cluster tha ..."
Abstract - Cited by 37 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
Due to the impressive price-performance of today’s PCbased graphics accelerator cards, Sandia National Laboratories is attempting to use PC clusters to render extremely large data sets in interactive applications. This paper describes a sort-last parallel rendering system running on a PC cluster that is capable of rendering enormous amounts of geometry onto high-resolution tile displays by taking advantage of the spatial coherency that is inherent in our data. Furthermore, it is capable of scaling to larger sized input data or higher resolution displays by increasing the size of the cluster. Our prototype is now capable of rendering 120 million triangles per second on a 12 mega-pixel display.
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Parallel Rendering with K-Way Replication

by Rudrajit Samanta , Thomas Funkhouser, Kai Li - IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON PARALLEL AND LARGE-DATA VISUALIZATION AND GRAPHICS , 2001
"... With the recent advances in commodity graphics hardware performance, PC clusters have become an attractive alternative to traditional high-end graphics workstations. The main challenge is to develop parallel rendering algorithms that work well within the memory constraints and communication limitati ..."
Abstract - Cited by 35 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
With the recent advances in commodity graphics hardware performance, PC clusters have become an attractive alternative to traditional high-end graphics workstations. The main challenge is to develop parallel rendering algorithms that work well within the memory constraints and communication limitations of a networked cluster. Previous systems have required the entire 3D scene to be replicated in memory on every PC. While this approach can take advantage of view-dependent load balancing algorithms and thus largely avoid the problems of inter-process communication, it limits the scalability of the system to the memory capacity of a single PC. We present a k-way replication approach in which each 3D primitive of a large scene is replicated on k out of n PCs (k << n). The key idea is to support 3D models larger than the memory capacity of any single PC, while retaining the reduced communication overheads of dynamic view-dependent partitioning. In this paper, we investigate algorithms for distributing copies of primitives among PCs and for dynamic load balancing under the constraints of partial replication. Our main result is that the parallel rendering efficiencies achieved with small replication factors are similar to the ones measured with full replication. By storing one-fourth of Michelangelo's David model (800MB) on each of 24 PCs (each with 256MB of memory), our system is able to render 40 million polygons/second (65% efficiency).

Scalable Interactive Volume Rendering Using Off-the-Shelf Components

by Santiago Lombeyda, Laurent Moll, Mark Shand, David Breen, Alan Heirich - In Proc. IEEE Symp. Parallel Large-Data Vis. Graphics (PVG) (2001 , 2001
"... This paper describes an application of a second generation implementation of the Sepia architecture (Sepia-2) to interactive volumetric visualization of large rectilinear scalar fields. By employing pipelined associative blending operators in a sort-last configuration a demonstration system with 8 r ..."
Abstract - Cited by 31 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
This paper describes an application of a second generation implementation of the Sepia architecture (Sepia-2) to interactive volumetric visualization of large rectilinear scalar fields. By employing pipelined associative blending operators in a sort-last configuration a demonstration system with 8 rendering computers sustains 24 to 28 frames per second while interactively rendering large data volumes (1024x256x256 voxels, and 512x512x512 voxels). We believe interactive performance at these frame rates and data sizes is unprecedented. We also believe these results can be extended to other types of structured and unstructured grids and a variety of GL rendering techniques including surface rendering and shadow mapping. We show how to extend our single-stage crossbar demonstration system to multi-stage networks in order to support much larger data sizes and higher image resolutions. This requires solving a dynamic mapping problem for a class of blending operators that includes Porter-Duff compositing operators. CR Categories: C.2.4 [Computer Systems Organization]: Computer-Communication Networks---Distributed Systems; C.2.5 [Computer Systems Organization]: Computer-Communication Networks---Local and Wide Area Networks; C.5.1 [Computer System Implementation]: Large and Medium ("Mainframe") Computers---Super Computers; D.1.3 [Software]: Programming Techniques---Concurrent Programming; I.3.1 [Computing Methodologies ]: Computer Graphics---Hardware Architecture; I.3.2 [Computing Methodologies]: Computer Graphics---Graphics Systems; I.3.3 [Computing Methodologies]: Computer Graphics--- Picture/Image Generation; I.3.7 [Computing Methodologies]: Computer Graphics---Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism Keywords: sort-last, parallel, cluster, shear-warp, volume rendering, ray-c...
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Scalable Isosurface Visualization of Massive Datasets on COTS Clusters

by Xiaoyu Zhang, Chandrajit Bajaj, William Blanke , 2001
"... Our scalable isosurface visualization solution on a commodity offthe -shelf cluster is an end-to-end parallel and progressive platform, from the initial data access to the final display. In this paper we focus on the back end scalability by introducing a fully parallel and out-of-core isosurface ext ..."
Abstract - Cited by 23 (4 self) - Add to MetaCart
Our scalable isosurface visualization solution on a commodity offthe -shelf cluster is an end-to-end parallel and progressive platform, from the initial data access to the final display. In this paper we focus on the back end scalability by introducing a fully parallel and out-of-core isosurface extraction algorithm. It partitions the volume data according to its workload spectrum for load balancing and creates an I/O-optimal external interval tree to minimize the number of I/O operations of loading large data from disk. It achieves scalability by using both parallel processing and parallel disks. Interactive browsing of extracted isosurfaces is made possible by using parallel isosurface extraction and rendering in conjunction with a new specialized piece of image compositing hardware called the Metabuffer. We also describe an isosurface compression scheme that is efficient for isosurface processing.

Parallel and Out-of-core View-dependent Isocontour Visualization Using Random Data Distribution

by Xiaoyu Zhang, Chandrajit Bajaj, Vijaya Ramachandran - PROCEEDINGS OF THE JOINT EUROGRAPHICS-IEEE TCVG SYMPOSIUM ON VISUALIZATION (VISSYM-02 , 2002
"... In this paper we describe a parallel and out-of-core view-dependent isocontour visualization algorithm that efficiently extracts and renders the visible portions of an isosurface from large datasets. The algorithm first creates an occlusion map using ray-casting and nearest neighbors. With the occ ..."
Abstract - Cited by 18 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
In this paper we describe a parallel and out-of-core view-dependent isocontour visualization algorithm that efficiently extracts and renders the visible portions of an isosurface from large datasets. The algorithm first creates an occlusion map using ray-casting and nearest neighbors. With the occlusion map constructed, the visible portion of the isosurface is extracted and rendered. All steps are in a single pass with minimal communication overhead. The

TeraVision: a Distributed, Scalable, High Resolution Graphics Streaming System

by Rajvikram Singh, Byungil Jeong, Luc Renambot, Andrew Johnson, Jason Leigh - in the proceedings of IEEE Cluster 2004 , 2004
"... In electronically mediated distance collaborations involving scientific data, there is often the need to stream the graphical output of individual computers or entire visualization clusters to remote displays. This paper presents TeraVision as a scalable platform-independent solution which is capabl ..."
Abstract - Cited by 14 (7 self) - Add to MetaCart
In electronically mediated distance collaborations involving scientific data, there is often the need to stream the graphical output of individual computers or entire visualization clusters to remote displays. This paper presents TeraVision as a scalable platform-independent solution which is capable of transmitting multiple synchronized high-resolution video streams between single workstations and/or clusters without requiring any modifications to be made to the source or destination machines. Issues addressed include: how to synchronize individual video streams to form a single larger stream; how to scale and route streams generated by an array of MxN nodes to fit a XxY display; and how TeraVision exploits a variety of transport protocols. Results from experiments conducted over gigabit local-area networks and wide-area networks (between Chicago and Amsterdam), are presented. Finally, we propose the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE)- an architecture to support future collaborative visualization environments with potentially billions of pixels. 1.
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A Multi-Layered Image Cache for Scientific Visualization

by Eric Lamar, Valerio Pascucci - In IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics , 2003
"... We introduce a multi-layered image cache system that is designed to work with a pool of rendering engines to facilitate a frame-less, asynchronous rendering environment for scientific visualization. Our system decouples the rendering from the display of imagery at many levels; it decouples render fr ..."
Abstract - Cited by 11 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
We introduce a multi-layered image cache system that is designed to work with a pool of rendering engines to facilitate a frame-less, asynchronous rendering environment for scientific visualization. Our system decouples the rendering from the display of imagery at many levels; it decouples render frequency and resolution from display frequency and resolution; allows asynchronous transmission of imagery instead of the compute-send cycle of standard parallel systems; and allows local, incremental refinement of imagery without requiring all imagery to be re-rendered.

Scalable Graphics Architecture for High Resolution Displays

by Byungil Jeong, Ratko Jagodic, Luc Renambot, Rajvikram Singh, Andrew Johnson, Jason Leigh - Presented at IEEE Information Visualization Workshop 2005
"... We envision situation-rooms and research laboratories in which all the walls are made from seamless ultra-high-resolution displays fed by data streamed over ultra-high-speed networks from distantly located visualization, storage servers, and high ..."
Abstract - Cited by 11 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
We envision situation-rooms and research laboratories in which all the walls are made from seamless ultra-high-resolution displays fed by data streamed over ultra-high-speed networks from distantly located visualization, storage servers, and high
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