"Multiapplication Intertile Synchronization on Ultra-High-Resolution Display Walls"

Created on February 22, 2010

2010   ·   paper   ·   papers

Multiapplication Intertile Synchronization on Ultra-High-Resolution Display Walls

Nam, S., Deshpande, S., Vishwanath, V., Jeong, B., Renambot, L., Leigh, J.

image In SAGE, a compute cluster drives the individual displays, acting as a lightweight client that receives pixels from remote rendering resources Credit: S. Nam, EVL

Ultra-high-resolution tiled-display walls are typically driven by a cluster of computers. Each computer may drive one or more displays. Synchronization between the computers is necessary to ensure that animated imagery displayed on the wall appears seamless. Most tiled-display middleware systems are designed around the assumption that only a single application instance is running in the tiled display at a time. Therefore synchronization can be achieved with a simple solution such as a networked barrier. When a tiled display has to support multiple applications at the same time, however, the simple networked barrier approach does not scale. In this paper we propose and experimentally validate two synchronization algorithms to achieve low-latency, intertile synchronization for multiple applications with independently varying frame rates. The two phase algorithm is more generally applicable to various high resolution tiled display systems. The one-phase algorithm provides superior results but requires support for the Network Time Protocol and is more CPU-intensive.

Keywords: Frame synchronization, Tiled display, Cluster computing

General Terms: Algorithms, Performance