Parallel-SG

Abstract

This paper presents Parallel-SG, a novel high performance parallel graphics rendering system on PC-Cluster. Parallel-SG employs a hybrid sort-first and sort-last architecture based on retained-mode and aims at interactively rendering of large dataset on tiled display wall. Parallel-SG uses a new rendering and scheduling structure, called dynamic rendering team (DRT as abbreviation), which is composed of multiple PCs instead of single PC to act as a rendering node. DRT gives support to two new technologies: a load-balancing strategy based on slave-migration and an optimized parallel Rendering-Composing-Display(R-C-D) pipeline. The load-balancing strategy follows such principle that adaptively maintaining the computational powers of DRTs to achieve good load balance, i. e. to dynamically redistribute slaves in a DRT according to its workload. The optimized parallel R-C-D pipeline reconstructs the serial workflow in a DRT to parallel one, and along with the outer parallel rendering pipelines among DRTs there forms a special nested parallel pipeline architecture, which promotes the whole rendering performance of our system greatly. Experiments show that the proposed Parallel-SG can render over 13M triangles at an average speed of 12 frames per second without accelerating technologies on a tile-display wall of 5*3 projectors array.