Parallel Particle Rendering: a Performance Comparison between Chromium and Aura

Abstract

In the fields of high performance computing and distributed rendering, there is a great need for a flexible and scalable architecture that supports coupling of parallel simulations to commodity visualization clusters. The most popular architecture that allows such flexibility, called Chromium, is a parallel implementation of OpenGL. It has sufficient performance on applications with static scenes, but in case of more dynamic content this approach often fails. We have developed Aura, a distributed scene graph library, which allows optimized performance for both static and more dynamic scenes. In this paper we compare the performance of Chromium and Aura. For our performance tests, we have selected a dynamic particle system application, which reveals several issues with the Chromium approach of implementing the OpenGL API. Because our distributed scene graph architecture was designed with a different approach, the test results will show that it performs better on this application.