An Architeture with Automatic Load Balancing for Real-Time Simulation and Visualization Systems

Nowadays, multithread hardware architectures like multi-core CPUs and GPUs found on PCs and game consoles (as Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3) are a trend. Hence, real-time simulation and visualization systems, such as scientific visualization, games and virtual reality environments, will not get the best performance on such architectures running sequentially in a single-thread loop. For this reason, multithread real-time loop models that take advantage of such architectures are gaining importance. This paper presents a survey on loop models for games and real-time systems. Also it discusses the usage of simple loops with single-thread architecture and multithread loop architectures in scientific simulations and visualization systems. Furthermore, this paper presents a new architecture for real-time loops that can detect and analyze the user hardware in order to adapt itself to a specific loop model, achieving the best performance for a specific hardware and application.

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