Hardware-Accelerated Multi-Tile Streaming for Realtime Remote Visualization

Abstract

The physical separation of compute resource and end user is one of the core challenges in HPC visualization. While GPUs are routinely used in remote rendering, a heretofore unexplored aspect is these GPUs' special purpose video en-/decoding hardware that can be used to solve the large-scale remoting challenge. The high performance and substantial bandwidth savings offered by such hardware enable a novel approach to the problems inherent in remote rendering, with impact on the workflows and visualization scenarios available. Using more tiles than previously thought reasonable, we demonstrate a distributed, lowlatency multi-tile streaming system that can sustain stable 80 Hz when streaming up to 256 synchronized 3840x2160 tiles and can achieve 365 Hz at 3840x2160 for sort-first compositing over the internet.