The last two weeks have been quiet, since I was on biking through Switzerland. Meanwhile, poor Daniel back at work churned through most of the Collage changes outlined in the last post. You can see the changes in the Collage endian branch on github, which will be merged back into master in the next couple of weeks.
Now back to the news: After finally figuring out how to build Equalizer and dependencies using MacPorts portfiles on Mac OS X, I released the long-standing 1.4 version of Equalizer, GPU-SD, Lunchbox and vmmlib. Below is the release announcement – enjoy!
Neuchatel, Switzerland – September 7, 2012 – Eyescale is pleased to announce the release of Equalizer 1.4.
Equalizer is the standard framework to create and deploy parallel, scalable 3D applications. This modular release includes Collage 0.6, a cross-platform C++ library for building heterogenous, distributed applications, GPU-SD 1.4, a C++ library and daemon for the discovery and announcement of graphics processing units using zeroconf networking and Lunchbox 1.4, a C++ library for multi-threaded programming. All software packages are available for free for commercial and non-commercial use under the LGPL open source license.
Equalizer 1.4 is a feature release extending the 1.0 API, introducing major new features, most notably asynchronous readbacks, region of interest and thread affinity for increased performance during scalable rendering. It culminates over seven years of development and decades of experience into a feature-rich, high-performance and mature parallel rendering framework and related high-performance C++ libraries.
Equalizer enables software developers to easily build interactive and scalable visualization applications, which optimally combine multiple graphics cards, processors and computers to scale the rendering performance, visual quality and display size.
Eyescale provides software consulting and development services for parallel 3D visualization software and GPU computing applications, based on the Eyescale software products or other open and closed source solutions.
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.
We would like to thank all individuals and parties who have contributed to the development of Equalizer 1.4.
Left image courtesy of Cajal Blue Brain/ / Blue Brain Project. Second from left copyright Realtime Technology AG, 2008. Right image courtesy University of Siegen, 2008.