Distributed Rendering for Scalable Displays
Greg Humphreys, Ian Buck, Matthew Eldridge, Pat Hanrahan · 2000
We describe a novel distributed graphics system that allows an application to render to a large tiled display. Our system, called WireGL, uses a cluster of off-the-shelf PCs connected with a highspeed network. WireGL allows an unmodified existing application to achieve scalable output resolution on such a display. This paper presents an efficient sorting algorithm which minimizes the network traffic for a scalable display. We will demonstrate that for most applications, our system provides scalable output resolution with minimal performance impact. Keywords: Remote Graphics, Cluster Rendering, Tiled Displays, Distributed Rendering 1 Introduction Modern supercomputers have allowed the scientific community to generate simulation datasets at sizes which were not feasible in previous years. The ability to efficiently visualize such large, dynamic datasets on a high-resolution display is a desirable capability for researchers. However, the display resolution offered by today's graphics h...