Performance Issues of a Distributed Frame Buffer on a Multicomputer

Wei, Bin; Clark, Douglas W.; Felten, Edward W.; Li, Kai

Performance Issues of a Distributed Frame Buffer on a Multicomputer

Files

087-096.pdf (1.55 MB)

Date

1998

Authors

Wei, Bin
Clark, Douglas W.
Felten, Edward W.
Li, Kai

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

A multiple-port, distributed frame buffer has been recently proposed to support parallel rendering on multicomputers. This paper describes an implementation of such a distributed frame buffer for the Intel Paragon routing network, and reports its performance results. We have conducted several experiments with the system we have developed. Our results indicate that placing a multipleport, distributed frame buffer directly on the host internal routing network can provide high throughput to eliminate the bottleneck of merging a final image from multiple processors to a frame buffer. This architectural approach can also effectively support image composition for sort-last. The synchronization algorithm we have developed requires only one-way communication and minimizes receive overhead for message passing to the frame buffer.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/EGGH/EGGH98/087-096
,
booktitle = {SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware
},
editor = {S. N. Spencer
},
title = {{Performance Issues of a Distributed Frame Buffer on a Multicomputer
}},
author = {Wei, Bin and 
Clark, Douglas W. and 
Felten, Edward W. and 
Li, Kai
},
year = {1998
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-3471
},
ISBN = {0-89791-097-X
},
DOI = {/10.2312/EGGH/EGGH98/087-096
}
}