Welcome to Equalizer 0.4, a framework for the development and deployment of scalable OpenGL applications. Equalizer 0.4 simplifies the development of parallel OpenGL programs substantially over the previous version.
Equalizer 0.4 is a beta release, and therefore intended as preview and evaluation snapshot for application developers and early adopters.
Features
Equalizer provides the following major features to facilitate the development and deployment of scalable OpenGL applications. A detailed feature list can be found on the Equalizer website.
- Runtime Configurability: An Equalizer application can run on any configuration, from laptops to large scale visualization clusters, without recompilation. The runtime configuration is externalized from the application to a systemwide resource server.
- Runtime Scalability: An Equalizer application can use multiple CPU's, GPU's and computers to scale the rendering performance of a single view.
- Distributed Execution: Equalizer applications can be written to support cluster-based execution. The task of distributing the application data is facilitated by support for versioned, distributed objects.
- Support for Stereo and Immersive Environments: Equalizer supports both active and passive stereo rendering, as well as the head tracking, which is required for immersive Virtual Reality installations.
New in this release
The following features, bug fixes and documentation changes where introduced in this release:
New Features
- Programming Guide in pdf and paper versions
- Fixed frustum aspect ratio support
- View configuration using projector layout
- Much improved polygonal rendering example performance
- New volume rendering example (beta technology preview)
- Support for volume-rendering applications
- Support for per-node frame synchronization
- Support for AGL and Carbon on Mac OS X
- Support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
- Support for Cygwin on Windows XP
- Infiniband support for Linux
- Improved event handling support
Bug Fixes
Equalizer 0.4 includes various bugfixes over the previous release.
Equalizer 0.4.1 fixes a critical bug in the build system which failed to detect Mac OS 10.5.1 and later.
New Documentation
- Programming Guide
- The Equalizer Parallel Rendering Framework, technical report
- Entwicklung eines parallelen OpenGL Polygon-Renderers, semester thesis in German about the new eqPly example
- Direct Send Compositing for Parallel Sort-Last Rendering presentation
- Transparency and sort-last (DB) compounds
- Volume Rendering Example
- Fixed Aspect Ratio
Removed Features
The incomplete support for CGL has been replaced by support for AGL and Carbon on Mac OS X. CGL has proven not to be useful in conjunction with windowing and event handling.
Supported Platforms
Equalizer is a cross-platform toolkit, designed to run on any modern operating system, including all Unix variants and the Windows operating system. A compatibility matrix can be found on the Equalizer website. Version 0.4 has been tested on:
Operating System Support
- Linux: Ubuntu 6.10 (x64, i386), RHEL4 (x64, i386)
- Windows: XP with Visual Studio 2005 (i386, x64) and Cygwin (i386)
- Mac OS X: 10.4 (PowerPC, i386) and 10.5 (i386)
Window System Support
- X11: Full support for all documented features.
- WGL: Full support for all documented features.
- AGL: Full support for all documented features.
Documentation
The Programming Guide is
part of the Equalizer distribution and can be found
in doc/Developer/ProgrammingGuide/paper.pdf. Equalizer does not
yet have an Users Guide. The shipped
eqPly
example provides a reference for developing or porting
applications. The Developer Documentation
on the website provides further design documents for specific features. The
source code is a last resort for information.
Support
Technical questions can be posted to the Developer Mailing List, or directly to info@equalizergraphics.com.
Commercial support, custom software development and porting services are available from EyeScale. Please contact info@eyescale.ch for further information.
