Abstract
Traditionally graphics clusters have been employed in real-time visualization of large geometric models (many millions of 3D points). Data parallel approaches have been the obvious choices when it comes to breaking up the computations over multiple processors. In recent years, programmable graphics hardware has gained widespread acceptance. Today, every processing node in a graphics cluster has two powerful and fully programmable processors – a CPU (Central Processing Unit) and a GPU (Graphics processing unit). It enables distribution of graphics computations targeting an applications’s needs in more flexible ways. In this paper we discuss and analyze our implementation of functionality distributed point-based rendering pipeline with impressive performance improvements. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to devise a functionality distribution scheme for a large data and compute-intensive application. We discuss the merits and limitations of such a distribution scheme by comparing it against traditional data parallel and single node schemes.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Humphreys, G., Houston, M., Ng, R., Frank, R., Ahern, S., Kirchner, P.D., Klosowski, J.T.: Chromium: a stream processing framework for interactive rendering on clusters. In: SIGGRAPH, pp. 693–702 (2002)
Muller, C.: The Sort-First Rendering Architecture for High-Performance Graphics. In: Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics (1995)
Buck, I., Foley, T., Horn, D., Sugerman, J., Fatahalian, K., Houston, M., Hanrahan, P.: Brook for GPUs: Stream Computing on Graphics Hardware. In: SIGGRAPH (2004)
Sutherland, I.E., Sproull, R.F., Schumacker, R.A.: A Characterization of Ten Hidden Surface Algorithms. ACM Computing Surveys 6, 1–55 (1974)
Molnar, S., Cox, M., Ellsworth, D., Fuchs, H.: A Sorting Classification of Parallel Rendering. IEEE Computer Graphics and Algorithms, 23–32 (1994)
Govindaraju, N.K., Sud, A., Yoon, S.E., Manocha, D.: Interactive visibility culling in complex environments using occlusion-switches. In: Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, pp. 103–112 (2003)
Govindaraju, N.K., Lloyd, B., Yoon, S., Sud, A., Manocha, D.: Interactive Shadow Generation in Complex Environments. In: ACM SIGGRAPH (2003)
Isard, M., Shand, M., Heirich, A.: Distributed rendering of interactive soft shadows. In: Parallel Graphics and Visualization, EGPGV, pp. 71–76 (2002)
Heirich, A., Moll, L.: Scalable Distributed Visualization Using Off-the-Shelf Components. In: IEEE Parallel Visualization and Graphics Symposium (1999)
Moll, L., Heirich, A., Shand, M.: Sepia: Scalable 3D Compositing Using PCI Pamette. In: IEEE Symposium on Field Programmable Custom Computing Machines (1999)
Zara, F., Faure, F., Vincent, J.M.: Physical cloth simulation on a PC cluster. Parallel Graphics and Visualisation (2002)
Fan, Z., Qiu, F., Kaufman, A., Yoakum-Stover, S.: GPU Cluster for High Performance Computing. In: Proceedings of ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference, Pittsburgh PA, USA (2004)
Kipfer, P., Slusallek, P.: Transparent Distributed Processing for Rendering. In: Parallel Visualization and Graphics Symposium (PVG), San Francisco (1999)
Rajagopalan, R., Goswami, D., Mudur, S.: Functionality Distribution for Parallel Rendering. In: IEEE IPDPS (2005)
Rajagopalan, R.: Functionality Distribution in Graphics. Master’s thesis, Concordia University, Canada (2005)
Levoy, M., Whitted, T.: The use of points as display primitives. Technical report, CS Departement, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1985)
Westover, L.: Interactive Volume Rendering. In: Chapel Hill Workshop Volume Visualization, pp. 9–16 (1989)
Grossman, J.P.: Point Sample Rendering. Master’s thesis, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT (1998)
Rusinkiewicz, S., Levoy, M.: QSplat: A Multiresolution Point Rendering System for Large Meshes. In: SIGGRAPH (2000)
Pfister, H., Zwicker, M., Baar, J.V., Gross, M.: Surfels: Surface elements as rendering primitives. In: SIGGRAPH, pp. 335–342 (2000)
Zwicker, M., Pfister, H., Baar, J.V., Gross, M.: Surface splatting. In: SIGGRAPH, pp. 371–378 (2001)
Ren, L., Pfister, H., Zwicker, M.: Object space EWA surface splatting: A hardware accelerated approach to high quality point rendering. In: Eurographics 2002, pp. 461–470 (2002)
Carsten, D., Christian, V., Marc, S.: Sequential Point Trees. In: SIGGRAPH (2003)
Hubo, E., Bekaer, P.: A Data Distribution Strategy for Parallel Point-Based Rendering. In: WSCG (2005)
Chilimbi, T.M., Hill, M.D., Larus, J.R.: Making Pointer-Based Data Structures Cache Conscious. IEEE Computer (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rajagopalan, R., Bhakar, S., Goswami, D., Mudur, S.P. (2005). Distributed Point Rendering. In: Bader, D.A., Parashar, M., Sridhar, V., Prasanna, V.K. (eds) High Performance Computing – HiPC 2005. HiPC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3769. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11602569_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11602569_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-30936-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32427-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)