Out-Of-Core Sort-First Parallel Rendering for Cluster-Based Tiled Displays

Correa, Wagner T.; Klosowski, James T.; Silva, Claudio T.

Out-Of-Core Sort-First Parallel Rendering for Cluster-Based Tiled Displays

Files

089-096.pdf (447.98 KB)

Date

2002

Authors

Correa, Wagner T.
Klosowski, James T.
Silva, Claudio T.

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

We present a sort-first parallel system for out-of-core rendering of large models on cluster-based tiled displays. The system is able to render igh-resolution images of large models at interactive frame rates using off-theshelf PCs with small memory. Given a model, we use an out-of-core preprocessing algorithm to build an on-disk hierarchical representation for the model. At run time, each PC renders the image for a display tile, using an out-of-core rendering approach that employs multiple threads to overlap rendering, visibility computation, and disk operations. The system can operate in approximate mode for real-time rendering, or in conservative mode for rendering with guaranteed accuracy. Running our system in approximate mode on a cluster of 16 PCs each with 512 MB of main memory, we are able to render 12-megapixel images of a 13-million-triangle model with 99.3% of accuracy at 10.8 frames per second. Rendering such a large model at high resolutions and interactive frame rates would typically require expensive high-end graphics hardware. Our results show that a cluster of inexpensive PCs is an attractive alternative to those high-end systems.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV02/089-096
,
booktitle = {Eurographics Workshop on Parallel Graphics and Visualization
},
editor = {D. Bartz and X. Pueyo and E. Reinhard
},
title = {{Out-Of-Core Sort-First Parallel Rendering for Cluster-Based Tiled Displays
}},
author = {Correa, Wagner T. and 
Klosowski, James T. and 
Silva, Claudio T.
},
year = {2002
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-348X
},
ISBN = {1-58113-579-3
},
DOI = {/10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV02/089-096
}
}