Application of interactive parallel visualization for commodity-based clusters using visualization APIs

Abstract

We present an efficient and inexpensive to develop application for interactive high-performance parallel visualization. We extend popular APIs such as Open Inventor and VTK to support commodity-based cluster visualization. Our implementation follows a standard master/slave concept: the general idea is to have a ``Master'' node, which will intercept a sequential graphical user interface (GUI) and broadcast it to the ``Slave'' nodes. The interactions between the nodes are implemented using MPI. The parallel remote rendering uses Chromium. This paper is mainly the report of our implementation experiences. We present in detail the proposed model and key aspects of its implementation. Also, we present performance measurements, we benchmark and quantitatively demonstrate the dependence of the visualization speed on the data size and the network bandwidth, and we identify the singularities and draw conclusions on Chromium's sort-first rendering architecture. The most original part of this work is the combined use of Open Inventor and Chromium.