An accelerated remote graphics architecture for PDAS

ABSTRACT

A new category of devices, known as Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), has become increasingly widespread since the end of the nineties. A large number of software applications have been developed for PDAs, but high-quality 3D graphics still remain beyond the computational capability of these devices.This paper tackles this issue by proposing a generic solution for hardware-accelerated remote rendering on cluster. The rendering task is submitted to a PC/workstation cluster (each cluster machine is equipped by a graphics accelerator) by means of the Chromium architecture. Each machine renders a part of the image that is then reassembled and sent to the PDA via a software bridge. On the PDA side, the user can explore the scene using an ad-hoc navigation interface.The proposed solution allows to display extremely realistic and complex models in an interactive way. Moreover, our architecture does not depend on commercial solutions/products and can be easily modified in order to better fulfill requirements of specific applications.Computer GraphicsDistributed/network graphics Distributed SystemsDistributed applications

REFERENCES

• 1: Wes Bethel, Visualization Dot Com, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.20 n.3, p.17-20, May 2000 [doi>10.1109/38.844367]
• 2: CHROMIUM, 2002. http://sourceforge.net/projects/chromium/.
• 3: ELITE, 2002. http://home.rochester.rr.com/ohommes/elite/.
• 4: ENGEL, K., SOMMER, O., AND ERTL, T. 2000. A Framework for Interactive Hardware Accelerated Remote 3D-Visualization. In Proceedings of EG/IEEE TCVG Symposium on Visualization VisSym '00, 167-177,291.
• 5: GLX, 2002. http://www.sgi.com/software/opensource/glx/.
• 6: William Gropp , Ewing Lusk , Anthony Skjellum, Using MPI (2nd ed.): portable parallel programming with the message-passing interface, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999
• 7: W. Wilson Ho , Ronald A. Olsson, An approach to genuine dynamic linking, Software—Practice & Experience, v.21 n.4, p.375-390, April 1991 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380210404]
• 8: Greg Humphreys , Matthew Eldridge , Ian Buck , Gordan Stoll , Matthew Everett , Pat Hanrahan, WireGL: a scalable graphics system for clusters, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.129-140, August 2001 [doi>10.1145/383259.383272]
• 9: Greg Humphreys , Mike Houston , Ren Ng , Randall Frank , Sean Ahern , Peter D. Kirchner , James T. Klosowski, Chromium: a stream-processing framework for interactive rendering on clusters, Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, July 23-26, 2002, San Antonio, Texas
• 10: KILGARD, M., 2002. GLR, an OpenGL Render Server Facilitiy. Silicon Graphics, Inc. (http://reality.sgi.com).
• 11: Kwan-Liu Ma , David M. Camp, High performance visualization of time-varying volume data over a wide-area network status, Proceedings of the 2000 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (CDROM), p.29-es, November 04-10, 2000, Dallas, Texas, United States
• 12: MPI, 2002. http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/.
• 13: OPENGL, 2002. http://www.opengl.org.
• 14: POCKETGL, 2002. http://pierrel5.free.fr/pocketglb/readme rst.htm.
• 15: POPE, A. 1997. The CORBA Reference Guide. Addison Wesley.
• 16: Tristan Richardson , Quentin Stafford-Fraser , Kenneth R. Wood , Andy Hopper, Virtual Network Computing, IEEE Internet Computing, v.2 n.1, p.33-38, January 1998 [doi>10.1109/4236.656066]
• 17: Simon Stegmaier , Marcelo Magallón , Thomas Ertl, A generic solution for hardware-accelerated remote visualization, Proceedings of the symposium on Data Visualisation 2002, May 27-29, 2002, Barcelona, Spain
• 18: VIZSERVER, 2002. Silicon Graphics, Inc. http://www.sgi.com/.
• 19: Mason Woo , Davis , Mary Beth Sheridan, OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 1.2, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999