Implementation and evaluation of the parallel Mesa library

Abstract

Describes the implementation and performance evaluation of a 3D graphics library that can be readily linked with parallel applications to provide run-time visualization on large-scale message-passing parallel machines, such as the Intel Paragon. The prototype implementation is currently fully operational, and is based on Mesa, a public-domain OpenGL implementation, and on a sort-last parallelization strategy. Through a detailed performance analysis, we show that the scalability of the current prototype is close to the theoretical limit for the given hardware architecture. We have also developed a unified framework to describe parallel compositing algorithms and show that two popular parallel compositing algorithms, binary swapping and parallel pipeline compositing, are just two extreme instances of this framework. Such a framework is important because it allows users to tailor the compositing algorithm according to the computation/communication characteristics of specific parallel machines by tuning the parameters appropriately. The current parallel Mesa library prototype implements such a parameterizable family of compositing algorithms.