Chromium: A Stress-Processing Framework for Interactive Rendering on Clusters

Conference · Thu Jan 10 23:00:00 EST 2002

OSTI ID:803180

Humphreys, G ^[1]; Houston, M; Ng, Y -R; Frank, R; Ahern, S; Kirchner, P D; Klosowski, J T

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1. LLNL

We describe Chromium, a system for manipulating streams of graphics API commands on clusters of workstations. Chromium's stream filters can be arranged to create sort-first and sort-last parallel graphics architectures that, in many cases, support the same applications while using only commodity graphics accelerators. In addition, these stream filters can be extended programmatically, allowing the user to customize the stream transformations performed by nodes in a cluster. Because our stream processing mechanism is completely general, any cluster-parallel rendering algorithm can be either implemented on top of or embedded in Chromium. In this paper, we give examples of real-world applications that use Chromium to achieve good scalability on clusters of workstations, and describe other potential uses of this stream processing technology. By completely abstracting the underlying graphics architecture, network topology, and API command processing semantics, we allow a variety of applications to run in different environments.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab., Livermore, CA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Defense Programs (DP) (US)
• DOE Contract Number: W-7405-ENG-48
• OSTI ID: 803180
• Report Number(s): UCRL-JC-146802
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
ACCELERATORS
ALGORITHMS
ARCHITECTURE
CHROMIUM
TOPOLOGY
TRANSFORMATIONS