Publikation
DRONE: a Flexible Framework for Distributed Rendering and Display
Michael Repplinger; Alexander Löffler; Dmitri Rubinstein; Philipp Slusallek
In: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing 2009. International Conference on Visual Computing (ISVC-09), November 30 - December 2, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, Springer, 2009.
Zusammenfassung
The available rendering performance on current computers increases constantly, primarily by employing parallel algorithms using the newest many-core hardware, as for example multi-core CPUs or GPUs. This development enables faster rasterization, as well as conspicuously faster software-based real-time ray tracing. Despite the tremendous progress in rendering power, there are and always will be applications in classical computer graphics and Virtual Reality, which require distributed configurations employing multiple machines for both rendering and display.
In this paper we address this problem and use NMM, a distributed multimedia middleware, to build a powerful and flexible rendering framework. Our framework is highly modular, and can be easily reconfigured -- even at runtime -- to meet the changing demands of applications built on top of it. We show that the flexibility of our approach comes at a negligible cost in comparison to a specialized and highly-optimized implementation of distributed rendering.