Integration of a Commodity Cluster into an Existing 4-Wall Display System

Abstract

Not all virtual reality applications today require the power or expense of single large visualization "supercomputers". Factors such as frame rate and polygon count have a major impact upon the performance of a VR application. Increasingly, low cost commodity consumer electronics and computing technology are becoming powerful enough to present an acceptable level of graphics performance. Already, commodity PCs are driving virtual reality workbenches with stereo and tracking options. The next step is to have them drive multi-screen environments. We present an experiment motivated by the low cost per performance of PC commodity clusters. The experiment is to replace a visualization super-computing platform driving a 4-wall immersive display system [1] with a PC commodity cluster. We describe the system, implementation and experimental testing in the paper.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2002
Accession Number
ADA501596

Entities

People

  • Aaron Bryden
  • Douglas B. Maxwell
  • Greg S. Schmidt
  • Ian Roth
  • J. E. Swan Ii

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Commodities
  • Computer Architecture
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Display Systems
  • Graphics
  • Information Operations
  • Massachusetts
  • Military Research
  • Parallel Ports
  • Software Design
  • Standards
  • Video
  • Virtual Reality
  • Visualizations
  • Workshops

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Government Contracting/Procurement.
  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Technology Areas

  • Microelectronics
  • Microelectronics - Microelectromechanical Systems