Faster Graphics
Aaron Birkland (original author), Adam Brazier
Cornell Center for Advanced Computing
Revisions: 3/2023, 10/2014, 1/2009 (original)
Each part of the visualization pipeline can be parallelized in various ways. This overview of the types of parallelization will present the basic options. Parallelization of the graphics pipeline is done in very specific ways because the need to sort polygons before displaying them may be crucial.
Understanding these techniques may clarify aspects of the interface for ParaView and other visualization packages.
Objectives
After you complete this segment, you should be able to:
- Distinguish among task, pipeline, and data parallelism
- Distinguish between sort-first and sort-last techniques
- Explain the concept of sort-middle
- Explain how the IceT library can be used for parallel rendering
- Define the term remote visualization
- List the reasons for using remote visualization
- Explain how connection speeds affect remote visualization
- Describe how the ParaView application runs on a cluster
- Demonstrate using a data server and render server
- Explain how to reduce network traffic for running a render server
Prerequisites
- Some elements of this section refer to ParaView; this topic and the ParaView topic could be read in parallel