MPIglut: powerwall programming made easier

Abstract

A powerwall is an array of separate screens that work together to provide a single unified display. Powerwalls are often driven by a small cluster, which requires parallel software to organize and synchronize the distributed rendering process. This paper describes MPIglut, our powerwall-friendly implementation of the popular sequential GLUT OpenGL 3D programming interface. MPIglut internally communicates using MPI to provide a single coherent display even across a distributedmemory parallel machine. Uniquely, MPIglut is sourcecode compatible with ordinary sequential GLUT code while providing high performance.