Dynamic Frame Resize

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 Mac OS X with Makefiles

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!

Four years of Equalizer

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!