Lang Zhi wrote:
> 1) Is it possible to have 2 or more display cards,working together in
> Parallel,like ethernet channel bonding style - so that the image etc can be
> rendered faster ?
>
Since you sent to Beowulf, I'm guessing you have multiple machines, each
with a video card. Otherwise, I'm sure a multiheaded hardware
accelerated OpenGL capable X like from http://www.metrolink.com or
http://www.xig.com would work.
I'm also guessing that you want OpenGL style rendering, for speed,
rather than the more complex and realistic software rendering offered by
Pixar, Blue Moon, or Povray. Each of these packages has cluster
rendering capabilities.
With Multiple machines, each with a single video card and an OpenGL
hardware or software accelerated X server (a software OpenGL might be
OK, since each video card would have a dedicated CPU), you could create
the OpenGL based application, running on each CPU.
Coordination between the applications running on different CPU's
requires some other tools...
First, you could use sockets to communicate between machines; PVM (
http://www.epm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html ) or MPI (
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/ ) are other popular choices.
If you need to sync the displays between CPU's (i.e. realtime
simulation), some folks at Purdue have a project called "Papers" that
has ultra low latency using very inexpensive hardware (it polls the
parallel ports). Since this also allows message passing between CPU's,
it could be an alternative to PVM/MPI/Sockets. see:
http://garage.ecn.purdue.edu/~papers
Coordination between the displays/X server requires anther tool...
Xhydra allows multiple video cards on separate machines to be controlled
by the mouse and keyboard on one machine. Robert Chesler
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) is it's author (take DELETE out of that
address; spam prevention). I know you can find it at Sunsite and such,
I don't know if he's ever set up a home page for it. I've got a lot of
modifications for it (mostly to do w/ wm support [some window managers
fight attempts to place invisible tripwire windows along the edges of
the display], but also for cutting and pasting between displays).
Hope that helps.
Chris
