Chromium: A Stream-Processing Framework for Interactive Rendering on Clusters
Greg Humphreys, Mike Houston, Ren Ng, Randall Frank, Sean Ahern, Peter Kirchner, Jim Klosowski
In ACM Transactions on Graphics, 21(3), July 2002.
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.
Keyword(s): Scalable Rendering, Cluster Rendering, Parallel Rendering,Tiled Displays, Remote Graphics, Virtual Graphics, Stream Processing
@article{Humphreys:2002:CAS,
author = {Greg Humphreys and Mike Houston and Ren Ng and Randall Frank and Sean Ahern and Peter Kirchner and Jim Klosowski},
title = {Chromium: A Stream-Processing Framework for Interactive Rendering on Clusters},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics},
volume = {21},
number = {3},
pages = {693--702},
month = jul,
year = {2002},
}
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