Performance issues of a distributed frame buffer on a multicomputer
Bin Wei, Douglas W. Clark, Edward W. Felten, Kai Li, Gordon Stoll · 1998
A multiple-port, distributed frame buffer has been recently proposed to support parallel rendering on multicomputers.This paper describes an implementation of such a distributed frame buffer for the Intel Paragon routing network, and reports its performance results.We have conducted several experiments with the system we have developed.Our results indicate that placing a multipleport, distributed frame buffer directly on the host internal routing network can provide high throughput to eliminate the bottleneck of merging a final image from multiple processors to a frame buffer.This architectural approach can also effectively support image composition for sort-last.The synchronization algorithm we have developed requires only one-way communication and minimizes receive overhead for message passing to the frame buffer.