Distributed Processing of Large Polygon Meshes

Abstract

A system is described to remotely perform complex geometry processing on arbitrarily large triangle meshes. A distributed network of servers provides both the software and hardware necessary to undertake the computations, while the overall execution is managed by a central engine that both invokes appropriate Web services and handles the data transmission. Nothing more than a standard web browser needs to be installed on the client machine hosting the input mesh. The user interface allows to build complex pipelines by stacking geometric algorithms and by controlling their execution through conditions and cycles. Besides the technological contribution, an innovative mesh transfer protocol is described to treat large datasets whose transmission across scattered servers may represent a bottleneck. Also, efficiency and effectiveness are guaranteed thanks to a novel divide and conquer approach that the engine exploits to partition large meshes into smaller pieces, each delivered to a dedicated server for parallel processing. Based on this paradigm, a distributed simplification algorithm has been implemented which proves that the overhead due to data transmission is negligible, as it is much lower than the gain in speed provided by parallel processing.