Scalable, Open Source Scene Software for High Performance Graphics and Visualization

70634 Advances in computing hardware technology have created unique opportunities for low-cost, high performance graphics and visualization systems. As with many software applications and tools, those provided by commercial vendors often do not adequately address the needs of the high performance computing (HPC) and research community. This project will build on Open Source software to produce a scene graph programming interface that is consistent with ongoing research efforts within the DOE HPC community, improves end-to-end efficiency, and increases the usefulness of scalable hardware systems constructed from commercial, off-the-shelf-components. In Phase I, the OpenRM Scene Graph programming interface will be extended so that it is compatible with the Chromium parallel graphics software tool. Demonstration programs, including high performance visualization prototypes, will show how the software can be used by the scientific research community to attack large scale visualization tasks on commodity computing and graphics hardware. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: The scene graph technology should increase developer efficiency and increase application performance. Armed with these highly efficient tools, developers can avoid having to reimplement an optimized code for each new application, and reuse existing software components, thereby significantly reducing the time required for software development.