Hello!
It appears that Delta3D has been used in a CAVE like
cluster driven environment. I started to wonder how this distribution to different rendering PCs can been acchived, is there any specific clustering support in Delta3D?
Regards,
JPR
We've written custom host and IG applications which communicate using CIGI. The IG application uses Delta3D to render the views (in our case, three views). Each view has a dedicated PC to drive it.
Currently, there is no specific clustering support in Delta3D. To do so would require the underlying Projects (OSG, ODE, etc.) to be "clusterable" as well.
Feel like making Delta3D run on a cluster??
Thanks for the response. We are currently running our custom software on a PC cluster, which utilises game engines in the rendering PCs. It is sort of layer atop of graphics APIs etc and it is currently not opensource (more in development at the moment, however it has been used already for things like architectural vis. etc.).
To utilise Delta3D features fully it would seem that the distribution would be nice to have on a level inside Delta3D to get physics and other stuff distributed as you mentioned. Nevertheless I'm playing with the idea of experimenting with Delta3D to implement the rendering component of our system. If I go along this line I will let you know.
I'd be interested in talking with you about your cluster rendering efforts. For about 4 years, I worked with Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan at Virginia Tech on cluster rendering. We worked at a very low level experiementing with many forms of the classic sort-first, sort-last, and sort-middle solutions with all approaches using MPI across myrinet. Our work is dated now, since for a little over a year I have had no access to clusters since I left Virginia Tech.
The OpenMosix project is designed to perform autonomous process migration and load balancing between a networked group of machines.
Here's the link:
http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/
OpenMosix migrates processes automatically; the applications' don't need to be written in parallel to run on OpenMosix.
I humbly suggest trying OpenMosix using Live OpenMosix CD's. You can get a cluster up quickly by booting to the live CD's to experiement.
There are specialized OpenMosix live CD's ranging in everything from audio processing to GIS.
It's fun watching the machines share the load using the graphical admin tools. It actually works!
In short, is OpenMosix a true parallelizing super computer? No. Is it very good at generically sharing the load? Why, yes, it is. This may be a workable "brute force" method to increase processing power.
Hello all,
Clustering can be achieved via VRJuggler which supports OSG.
However, I wonder about VRJuggler + Delta3D integration.
Thanks.
For OSG you can run it on Chromium with the Cave SPU and that works. But last time I check that didnot support trackers. but you can use it to do stereo. We have done it here with our passive stereo system. I dont see any reason why delta3d wouldnt run on chromium. Although this is not the most effecient way.
Supposedly, OSG has been known to work well on clusters via Producer's support. Since Delta3D currently uses Producer code in several places, I think the quickest way to obtain a good real time framework for cluster applications would be to test/improve our Producer based engine.
However, VR Juggler does have much attention devoted to cluster applications, and OSG will work with VRJ. If you check the mailing list for VRJ, you will see a lot of conversations about how to improve OSG support. If complete support isn't already included (I haven't check VRJ's CVS in a while), then I am sure it will come soon VRJ is a very active project with a proven framework and a nice looking API. It would be nice to integrate our engine components with VRJ-supported interaction and display technologies sometime in the future.
Yes VRJ does have OSG support, but you have to write your app with their API. Any standalone app should run fine on Chromium, once again it is not the most effecient way. And if you want to look into something for developement I would look into osgVR. I havent read much about it but I would try to avoid VRJ, it is buggy and seems disorganized.
[QUOTE]Any standalone app should run fine on Chromium, once again it is not the most effecient way.[/QUOTE]
VRJ's clustering support is efficient.
[QUOTE]I havent read much about it but I would try to avoid VRJ, it is buggy and seems disorganized.[/QUOTE]
I have read about it, and have used it. I couldn't ever say VRJ is buggy, and they probably do more with documentation than any OSS project of which I am aware.
I would suggest that the OSGVR by Michael Grönagher is probably the best way to go. I don't know how much time he has right now for this sort of thing, but he has helped us a lot getting OSG clustering working on our CAVE using the version called fIVE. I could ask him for some help...
As I understand it, his soluion is quite general, and could no doubt pass other events as well as those needed by OSG.
Delta3D - Forum
http://www.delta3d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=222