High-Performance Scalable Graphics Architecture for High-Resolution Displays

We present the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE), a graphics streaming architecture for supporting collaborative scientific visualization environments with potentially hundreds of megapixels of contiguous display resolution. In collaborative scientific visualization it is crucial to share high resolution visualizations as well as high definition video among groups of collaborators at local or remote sites. Our network-centered architecture allows collaborators to simultaneously run multiple visualization applications on local or remote clusters and share the visualizations by streaming the pixels of each application over ultra high speed networks to large tiled displays. This streaming architecture is designed such that the output of arbitrary M by N pixel rendering cluster nodes can be streamed to X by Y pixel display screens allowing for userdefinable layouts on the display. This dynamic pixel routing capability of our architecture allows users to freely move and resize each application’s imagery over the tiled displays in runtime, tightly synchronizing the multiple visualization streams to form a single stream. Experimental results show that our architecture can support visualization at multi-ten-megapixel resolution with reasonable frame rates using gigabit networks. CR

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