Abstract
Nowadays, clusters of interconnected workstations have become a common solution for powering large composite displays, or “cluster display walls”, to visualize high resolution images. Our paper is focused on analyzing a specific cluster display wall developed by Google, named Liquid Galaxy, made up of heterogeneous commodity hardware with different degrees of heterogeneity, running master-slave (Google Earth) and client-server (Quake III Arena) multimedia applications. With this in mind, we define and test different scenarios, representing the behavior of many kinds of users. Our results show that the CPU, memory and network are good enough to execute the client-server application, while, depending on the user behavior, the external network constitutes the bottleneck of the system in Google Earth. So, the master-slave application has focused our attention. Likewise, in order to analyze the users’ point of view when interacting with Google Earth in the Liquid Galaxy, we define a new metric, named Visualization Rate (VR), which enables a relationship to be established between the user experience and the platform performance. In order to set the minimum acceptable value of the VR parameter according to users perception, we carried out different tests with real users. Then, this minimum threshold was compared with the VR value obtained from the automated benchmarking performed afterwards on clusters with different heterogeneity degrees. Finally, we analyzed the VR trend when the Liquid Galaxy is scaled from 3 up to 8 nodes in both the homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures to study the scalability of the system.
Highlights
Nowadays, new trends in information and communication technologies, storage density and increasingly sophisticated data acquisition technologies have led to an explosion in data size
This paper analyzes the use of a specific cluster display wall hemisphere infrastructure developed by Google, named Liquid Galaxy [8], running both kinds of applications, a video-game as a client-server and the well-known Google Earth application [9], which is an example of a master-slave application
The paper is focused in master-slave by carrying out a detailed performance analysis of Google Earth running in the Liquid Galaxy The results show that a cluster display wall composed of conventional desktop computers provides enough CPU and memory to execute Google Earth
Summary
New trends in information and communication technologies, storage density and increasingly sophisticated data acquisition technologies have led to an explosion in data size. This paper analyzes the use of a specific cluster display wall hemisphere infrastructure developed by Google, named Liquid Galaxy [8], running both kinds of applications, a video-game as a client-server and the well-known Google Earth application [9], which is an example of a master-slave application. We built a new cluster display wall infrastructure with different heterogeneous configurations to identify the relationship between performance and user behavior according to the degree of heterogeneity of the system With this aim, the paper analyzes the main performance metrics of CPU, memory and networking by running a client-server and a master-slave application. The paper is focused in master-slave by carrying out a detailed performance analysis of Google Earth running in the Liquid Galaxy The results show that a cluster display wall composed of conventional desktop computers provides enough CPU and memory to execute Google Earth.
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