A Scalable and Reconfigurable Shared-Memory Graphics Cluster Architecture
Graphics, Vision and Visualisation Group, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin
ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Sketches, SIGGRAPH ’06
@conference{manzke2006scalable,
title={A scalable and reconfigurable shared-memory graphics architecture},
author={Manzke, M. and Brennan, R. and O’Conor, K. and Dingliana, J. and O’Sullivan, C.},
booktitle={ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Sketches},
pages={182},
isbn={1595933646},
year={2006},
organization={ACM}
}
If the computational demands of an interactive graphics rendering application cannot be met by a single commodity Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), multiple graphics accelerators may be utilised on multi-GPU based systems such as SLI [1] or Crossfire [2] or by a cluster of PCs in conjunction with a software infrastructure. Typically these PC cluster solutions allow the application programmer to use a standard OpenGL API. In this paper we describe an FPGA based hardware architecture, which provides an interface for multiple commodity graphics accelerators. Our scalable parallel rendering architecture aims to accelerate graphics applications using a tightly coupled hybrid system of parallel commodity GPUs and reconfigurable hardware [3], while providing similar services to the above mentioned approach. This is work in progress. So far, we have designed and manufactured the required custom-hardware. Currently, we are focussing on implementing the shared-memory subsystem.
January 13, 2011 by hgpu