Cluster Computing:

TUNGSTEN ANNOUNCES CHROMIUM RENDERSERVER FOR CLUSTERING

Tungsten Graphics, Inc., provider of Graphics infrastructure software and services announced Phase I STTR Contract Award by Department of Energy, Chromium RenderServer: Remote and Collaborative Rendering and Visualization with Distributed Memory Parallel Clusters.

Through funding provided by Department of Energy (DOE) Tungsten Graphics is developing the Chromium RenderServer. The project team for this Phase I project is: Brian Paul, Tungsten Graphics, Inc. (Principal Investigator), Randall Frank and Sean Ahern, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, E. Wes Bethel, R3vis Corporation, Greg Humphreys, Ahpah Software, and the University of Virginia

The work, called the Chromium RenderServer aims to provide remote users with network-based access to interactive visual data analysis capabilities located at central computing facilities; 3D scientific visualization is performed in parallel on interactive resources located at central facilities 'close to' the data, and the resulting imagery is transmitted over the network to one or more remote users. By design, the Chromium RenderServer allows any existing visualization application that meet a minimum set of technical criteria to be deployed in a remote fashion, and enables rapid deployment of a new generation of high performance remote visualization applications.

An important part of this development effort is Chromium. Chromium is a flexible framework for scalable real time rendering on clusters of workstations, derived from the Stanford WireGL project. A Chromium system allows clusters of low cost, high performance, commodity computer hardware and graphics accelerators to be linked together over high speed networks in a scalable architecture. Although many OpenGL applications will run unmodified as distributed applications in a Chromium system, it's often the case that customizations are needed to fully take advantage of Chromium.