We are pleased to announce the release of Equalizer 0.9, the standard framework to create and deploy parallel, scalable OpenGL applications. The most notable new features in this release are:

• Automatic cross-segment load-balancing for multi-display installations
• Dynamic Frame Resolution (DFR) for constant framerate rendering
• Compression Plugin API for runtime-loadable image compression engines

Please check the release notes on the Equalizer website for a comprehensive list of new features, enhancements, optimizations and bug fixes. A paperback book of the Programming and User Guide is available from Lulu.com.

We would like to thank all individuals and parties who have contributed to the development of Equalizer 0.9.

The upcoming Equalizer release will have another advanced scalability feature: Load-balancing across all resources used for the multi-display system.

This video should explain it all, if not ask in the comments below:

I hope to have benchmarks of this feature soon.

Click on the image to see a gallery of the various Virtual Reality applications in use at the University of Siegen.

All applications are based on Equalizer, and most of them use head tracking and a flight stick for interaction. The architectural walk-through is using OpenSceneGraph.

Below is a screenshot of an Equalizer configuration showing all basic decomposition modes in one window. The configuration file is in the source repository at examples/configs/1-window.mixed.eqc.

Top-left: Database
Top-right: DPlex
Bottom-left: 2D, load-balanced
Bottom-right (upper): Stereo
Bottom-right (lower): Pixel

Armadillo data set courtesy Stanford University Computer Graphics Laboratory.

We’ve been busy working on a new performance feature for Equalizer: Dynamic Frame Resize (DFR).

DFR automatically adapts the size of the rendering to achieve a constant framerate, which works very well for fill-limited applications such as eVolve. Of course, true to our mix-and-match strategy, it can also be combined with other scalable rendering features.

Enjoy:

Using distcc on OS X for make-based projects (as opposed to XCode) is really easy. distcc enables distributed builds using other Macs in your local network.

Here is what I do to speed up the compilation of Equalizer:

[Enable distcc compilation in the XCode preferences on each machine]

eile% cat ~/.distcc/hosts
localhost
MacOne
MacTwo
MacThree

eile% setenv CXX “distcc /usr/bin/g++”

eile% make -j8

Replace MacOne, MacTwo, MacThree with the machines available to you, and ‘-j8′ with the amount of CPU cores available. Enjoy!

Happy Birthday!

Last Sunday, we’ve passed the fourth anniversary of ‘Project Equalizer’, as it was called back then.

The name stuck, although we are way past a project definition. Equalizer has become a feature-rich, generic framework for creating parallel and scalable OpenGL applications.

Since last year, the code has matured considerably, and a lot of new exiting features such as load-balancing and DPlex (alternate frame rendering) support. Furthermore, the community has grown a lot and there are a couple of new users out there.

Since last year, the Equalizer project and community feels much more ’serious’, something which can’t be expressed by features alone. The upcoming BOF and activity on the mailing list is a good indicator for this.

I am looking forward to another year of interesting tasks around parallel programming and 3D graphics!

Good news everybody, we will be holding an Equalizer Birds-Of-a-Feather meeting during Eurographics’09 – mark your calenders:

- Place: Eurographics 2009, TU Munich
- Date: March 31, 15:00-16:30
- Room: To be announced

Co-located with EG is the Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, so there is yet another good reason to come to Munich!

We are still looking for presentations, please contact me by end of February if you are working with Equalizer and would like to present your work.

Coincidentally, there is also a new poll:

RTT just published a DeltaGen 8.5 video on youtube, including a shot of RTT Scale, which is based on Equalizer. Enjoy some realtime raytraced Audi Q5 goodness with global illumination:

Youtube link

If you just want to check if your Windows system can address GPU’s individually in OpenGL, there is a new tool on the Equalizer website which lists the GPU’s visible through the WGL_NV_gpu_affinity API. This is often useful if you want to cross-check your own code, or just verify a system setup. Feel free to post questions below!