Abstract
This paper describes the first use of a Network Processing Unit (NPU) to perform hardware-based image composition in a distributed rendering system. The image composition step is a notorious bottleneck in a clustered rendering system. Furthermore, image compositing algorithms do not necessarily scale as data size and number of nodes increase. Previous researchers have addressed the composition problem via software and/or custom-built hardware. We used the heterogeneous multicore computation architecture of the Intel IXP28XX NPU, a fully programmable commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology, to perform the image composition step. With this design, we have attained a nearly four-times performance increase over traditional software-based compositing methods, achieving sustained compositing rates of 22-28 fps on a 1,024 × 1,024 image. This system Is fully scalable with a negligible penalty in frame rate, is entirely COTS, and is flexible with regard to operating system, rendering software, graphics cards, and node architecture. The NPU-based compositor has the additional advantage of being a modular compositing component that is eminently suitable for integration into existing distributed software visualization packages.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 798-809 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2007 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
The authors would like to acknowledge the VisIt Development Team, in particular, Hank Childs, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for their valuable help. Nathan Brown incorporated stereo rendering into the NPU system and Adam Smith has extended the system to work with the ParaView software package. They would like to acknowledge Parks Fields, Alfred Torrez, Mike Fisk, Neal Pickett, and Fredie Marshal for their support of the system. They thank Gary Grider, Brett Kettering, Karl-Heinz Winkler, and the HPC and CTN division management teams for their ongoing support. The authors thank Jim Ahrens for useful conversations. Finally, they thank the reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Los Alamos National Laboratory, an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer, is operated by the Los Alamos National Security, LLC for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the US Department of Energy under contract DE-AC52-06NA25396. By acceptance of this article, the publisher recognizes that the US Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce the published form of this contribution, or to allow others to do so, for US Government purposes. Los Alamos National Laboratory requests that the publisher identify this article as work performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy. Los Alamos National Laboratory strongly supports academic freedom and a researcher’s right to publish; as an institution, however, the Laboratory does not endorse the viewpoint of a publication or guarantee its technical correctness. This paper is published under LA-UR 06-8555.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| U.S. Department of Energy | DE-AC52-06NA25396 |
| National Nuclear Security Administration | |
| Los Alamos National Laboratory |
Keywords
- Hardware-assisted image compositing
- High-performance computing
- Image compositing
- Network processing unit
- PC clusters
- Parallel rendering
- Visualization
- Volume rendering