A Shader-Based Parallel Rendering Framework

2007

Chromium Renderserver (CRRS) is software infrastructure that provides the ability for one or more users to run and view image output from unmodified, interactive OpenGL and X11 applications on a remote, parallel computational platform equipped with graphics hardware accelerators via industry-standard Layer 7 network protocols and client viewers. The new contributions of this work include a solution to the problem of synchronizing X11 and OpenGL command streams, remote delivery of parallel hardware-accelerated rendering, and a performance analysis of several different optimizations that are generally applicable to a variety of rendering architectures. CRRS is fully operational, Open Source software.

2010

Abstract Demand for 3D visualization is increasing in mobile devices as users have come to expect more realistic immersive experiences. However, limited networking and computing resources on mobile devices remain challenges. A solution is to have a proxy-based framework that offloads the burden of rendering computation from mobile devices to more powerful servers.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2000

Chromium Renderserver (CRRS) is software infrastructure that provides the ability for one or more users to run and view image output from unmodified, interactive OpenGL and X11 applications on a remote, parallel computational platform equipped with graphics hardware accelerators via industry-standard Layer 7 network protocols and client viewers. The new contributions of this work include a solution to the problem of synchronizing X11 and OpenGL command streams, remote delivery of parallel hardware-accelerated rendering, and a performance analysis of several different optimizations that are generally applicable to a variety of rendering architectures. CRRS is fully operational, Open Source software.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2008

Continuing improvements in CPU and GPU performances as well as increasing multi-core processor and cluster-based parallelism demand for flexible and scalable parallel rendering solutions that can exploit multipipe hardware accelerated graphics. In fact, to achieve interactive visualization, scalable rendering systems are essential to cope with the rapid growth of data sets. However, parallel rendering systems are non-trivial to develop and often only application specific implementations have been proposed. The task of developing a scalable parallel rendering framework is even more difficult if it should be generic to support various types of data and visualization applications, and at the same time work efficiently on a cluster with distributed graphics cards. In this paper we introduce a novel system called Equalizer, a toolkit for scalable parallel rendering based on OpenGL which provides an application programming interface (API) to develop scalable graphics applications for a wide range of systems ranging from large distributed visualization clusters and multi-processor multipipe graphics systems to single-processor single-pipe desktop machines. We describe the system architecture, the basic API, discuss its advantadges over previous approaches, present example configurations and usage scenarios as well as scalability results.

2008

The available rendering performance increases constantly, primarily by new hardware in the form of faster GPUs. Additionally, we also see increasingly more powerful many-core processors that have enabled more flexible and continuously faster software-based graphics-such as real-time ray tracing. Despite this tremendous hardware progress in rendering power, there are and will always be applications that require distributed configurations for rendering and display. In this paper we present URay, consisting of an X3D-based scene graph system that supports different rendering modules (e.g., rasterization, and ray tracing) and combine it with NMM, a system for distributed multimedia processing and streaming. Together, URay supports all of the above scenarios. URay is highly modular and flexible, and can easily be reconfigured-even at runtime-to meet the changing demands of the application. Even better, we demonstrate that this great flexibility of URay even comes at a negligible cost over specialized and highly-optimized implementations. URay will be made available as Open Source.

2004

Interactive rendering of complex models has many applications in the Virtual Reality Continuum. The oil&gas industry uses interactive visualizations of huge seismic data sets to evaluate and plan drilling operations. The automotive industry evaluates designs based on very detailed models. Unfortunately, many of these very complex geometric models cannot be displayed with interactive frame rates on graphics workstations. This is due to the limited scalability of their graphics performance. Recently there is a trend to use networked standard PCs to solve this problem. Care must be taken however, because of nonexistent shared memory with clustered PCs. All data and commands have to be sent across the network. It turns out that the removal of the network bottleneck is a challenging problem to solve in this context.

2008

Chromium Renderserver (CRRS) is software infrastructure that provides the ability for one or more users to run and view image output from unmodified, interactive OpenGL and X11 applications on a remote, parallel computational platform equipped with graphics hardware accelerators via industry-standard Layer 7 network protocols and client viewers. The new contributions of this work include a solution to the problem of synchronizing X11 and OpenGL command streams, remote delivery of parallel hardware-accelerated rendering, and a performance analysis of several different optimizations that are generally applicable to a variety of rendering architectures. CRRS is fully operational, Open Source software.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

The available rendering performance on current computers increases constantly, primarily by employing parallel algorithms using the newest many-core hardware, as for example multi-core CPUs or GPUs. This development enables faster rasterization, as well as conspicuously faster software-based real-time ray tracing. Despite the tremendous progress in rendering power, there are and always will be applications in classical computer graphics and Virtual Reality, which require distributed configurations employing multiple machines for both rendering and display. In this paper we address this problem and use NMM, a distributed multimedia middleware, to build a powerful and flexible rendering framework. Our framework is highly modular, and can be easily reconfigured-even at runtime-to meet the changing demands of applications built on top of it. We show that the flexibility of our approach comes at a negligible cost in comparison to a specialized and highly-optimized implementation of distributed rendering.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2001

This paper presents initial results from research targeted at the development of cost-effective scalable visualization and rendering technologies. The implementations of two 3D graphics libraries based on the popular sort-last and sort-first parallel rendering techniques are discussed. An important goal of these implementations is to provide scalable rendering capability for extremely large datasets (>> 5 million polygons). Applications can use these libraries for either run-time visualization, by linking to an existing parallel simulation, or for traditional postprocessing by linking to an interactive display program. The use of parallel, hardware-accelerated rendering on commodity hardware is leveraged to achieve high performance. Current performance results show that, using our current hardware (a small 16-node cluster), we can utilize up to 85% of the aggregate graphics performance and achieve rendering rates in excess of 20 million polygons/second using OpenGL® with lighting, Gouraud shading, and individually specified triangles (not t-stripped).

2002

Abstract. Clusters of commodity PCs are widely considered as the way to go to improve rendering performance and quality in many real-time rendering applications. We describe the design and implementation of our parallel rendering system for real-time rendering applications. Major design objectives for our system are: usage of commodity hardware for all system components, ease of integration into existing Virtual Environments software, and flexibility in applying different rendering techniques, e.g.