James T. Klosowski
IBM
USA
e-mail: jklosow@us.ibm.com |
http:// |
Abstract
In recent years, the performance of
commodity computer components has improved dramatically. Processors,
graphics adapters, and network adapters, for example, have all exhibited
significant improvements while maintaining a reasonable cost. Due to the
increase in the price/performance ratio of computers utilizing such components,
clusters of commodity machines have become commonplace in today's computing
world and are steadily displacing specialized, high-end, shared-memory machines
for many graphics and visualization workloads.
Utilization and acceptance of commodity
clusters has been a slow process at times due to the significant challenges
introduced when switching from a share-memory architecture to a distributed
memory one. In this presentation, I will discuss these challenges and the
many solutions that have been developed in recent years. At the forefront
will be the issue of scalability, whether it be scaling pixels, date, or overall
performance. As the nature of commodity hardware components suggests, the
solutions are largely software-based, and include middleware layers for
distributing the graphics workload across the cluster as well as for aggregating
the final results to display for the user.