NDLI: Evaluating multi-port frame buffer designs for a mesh-connected multicomputer

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Clark, Douglas Stoll, Gordon Felten, Edward W. Hanrahan, Patrick Wei, Bin Li, Kai
Abstract	Multicomputers can be effectively used for interactive graphics rendering only if there are mechanisms available to rapidly composite and transfer images to an external display device. One method for achieving the necessary bandwidth for this operation is to provide multiple high-bandwidth ports into a frame buffer. In this paper, we evaluate the design space of a multiport frame buffer design for the Intel Paragon mesh routing network. We use an instrumented rendering system to capture the graphics operations needed for rendering a number of three-dimensional scenes; we then use those workloads as input to test programs running on the Paragon to estimate the performance of our hardware. Our experiments consider three major design questions: how many network ports the frame buffer needs, whether Z-Buffering should be done in hardware on the frame buffer or in software on the computing nodes, and whether the design alternatives are scalable.
Starting Page	96
Ending Page	105
Page Count	10
File Format	PDF
ISBN	0897916980
DOI	10.1145/223982.224043
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	1995-07-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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Evaluating multi-port frame buffer designs for a mesh-connected multicomputer