WireGL: A Scalable Graphics System for Clusters
Matthew Everett and
Appears in Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2001
We describe WireGL, a system for scalable interactive rendering on a cluster of
workstations. WireGL provides the familiar OpenGL API to each node in a
cluster, virtualizing multiple graphics accelerators into a sort-first parallel
renderer with a parallel interface. We also describe techniques for
reassembling an output image from a set of tiles distributed over a cluster.
Using flexible display management, WireGL can drive a variety of output
devices, from standalone displays to tiled display walls. By combining the
power of virtual graphics, the familiarity and ordered semantics of OpenGL, and
the scalability of clusters, we are able to create time-varying visualizations
that sustain rendering performance over 70,000,000 triangles per second at
interactive refresh rates using 16 compute nodes and 16 rendering nodes.