Equalizer: A Scalable Parallel Rendering Framework

Continuing improvements in CPU and GPU performances as well as increasing multicore processor and cluster-based parallelism demand for flexible and scalable parallel rendering solutions that can exploit multipipe hardware accelerated graphics. In fact, to achieve interactive visualization, scalable rendering systems are essential to cope with the rapid growth of data sets. However, parallel rendering systems are nontrivial to develop and often only application specific implementations have been proposed. The task of developing a scalable parallel rendering framework is even more difficult if it should be generic to support various types of data and visualization applications and at the same time work efficiently on a cluster with distributed graphics cards. In this paper, we introduce a novel system called Equalizer, a toolkit for scalable parallel rendering based on OpenGL, which provides an application programming interface (API) to develop scalable graphics applications for a wide range of systems ranging from large distributed visualization clusters and multiprocessor multipipe graphics systems to single-processor single-pipe desktop machines. We describe the system architecture and the basic API, discuss its advantages over previous approaches, and present sample configurations and usage scenarios as well as scalability results.