Conceptual design and implementation of a pipeline-based VR-system parallelized by CORBA, and comparison with existing approaches

ABSTRACT

The object-oriented Virtual Reality toolkit ViSTA developed at Aachen University utilizes the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) in order to implement scientific visualization applications. VTK already offers parallelization possibilities. Its parallelization strategy cuts off the visualization pipeline between nodes and distributes these parts over several processes. By contrast, ViSTA makes use of an MPI-based parallelization framework whose parallelization components are decoupled from the algorithmic layer. Algorithms implemented here merely use sequential VTK pipelines for the computation.Our new approach also parallelizes VTK's pipelines; however, the parallelization is based on CORBA. The advantages over MPI-based implementations are a straightforward integration into an object-oriented framework and the handling of complex data structures. In this paper, we present our CORBA-based implementation and compare it to others. We show that CORBA should be preferred for complex and object-oriented environments and that it has speed-up properties in parallel environments similar to MPI-based approaches.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Virtual reality

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.5 Object-oriented Programming

          Nouns: CORBA

  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities

General Terms:
Algorithms, Performance

Keywords:
CORBA, MPI, parallelization, virtual reality, visualization pipeline