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Chromium: a stream-processing framework for interactive rendering on clusters

Published: 01 July 2002 Publication History

Abstract

We describe Chromium, a system for manipulating streams of graphics API commands on clusters of workstations. Chromium's stream filters can be arranged to create sort-first and sort-last parallel graphics architectures that, in many cases, support the same applications while using only commodity graphics accelerators. In addition, these stream filters can be extended programmatically, allowing the user to customize the stream transformations performed by nodes in a cluster. Because our stream processing mechanism is completely general, any cluster-parallel rendering algorithm can be either implemented on top of or embedded in Chromium. In this paper, we give examples of real-world applications that use Chromium to achieve good scalability on clusters of workstations, and describe other potential uses of this stream processing technology. By completely abstracting the underlying graphics architecture, network topology, and API command processing semantics, we allow a variety of applications to run in different environments.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 21, Issue 3
July 2002
548 pages
ISSN:0730-0301
EISSN:1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/566654
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 July 2002
Published in TOG Volume 21, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. cluster rendering
  2. parallel rendering
  3. remote graphics
  4. scalable rendering
  5. stream processing
  6. tiled displays
  7. virtual graphics

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