Stefan Eilemann, founder of Equalizer, after a long day

December 2007 Edition

Hello Equalizer Community,

This newsletter proudy marks the latest event in the world of Equalizer; the release of Equalizer version 0.4. This release carries with it quite a few significant enhancements, but I'm pretty sure that some of the most welcome aspects will be the Programming Guide (which will help application developers to get started), which is available as a hardcopy from lulu.com along with the new support for volume rendering. Also built into release 0.4 is an example application for volume rendering, so you can see for yourself how well it performs in a real world application. This new functionality takes Equalizer into new territory, opening it up to a whole host of new uses,s uch as medical imaging, or within the oil and gas industry.

By the way, if you would like to see an example of version 0.4 in use, take a look at Hui Chang's work with Equalizer.

There's plenty in store in the Equalizer road map. One example is load-balancing, which adapts the pre-node load during many-to-one rendering (2D and DB) so that all resources are always used to maximum efficiency. Furthermore, we'll be addressing some bottlenecks, especially in DB rendering, which promises to give a great performance boost. Actually, I've already started some minor tweaks with OpenMP - see here. Meanwhile, watch out for some serious benchmarking data on Equalizer performed by the University of Zurich, coming soon, and to be released as a journal article and paper.

I'm often getting asked questions regarding the characteristics and performance of Equalizer, and how it stacks up against other 'similar' applications. In particular, what are some of the key differences are between Chromium and Equalizer. It seems to be an ongoing discussion, so please let me know if you see any other arguments for Chromium or for Equalizer: wordpress.com/2007/07/29/chromium-vs-equalizer/.

It's quite often that I deal with OpenGL questions that revolve around parallel programs, which are not necessarily strictly related to Equalizer. To that end, I've put together a FAQ sheet that you may find useful. It deals with subjects such as multiple threads, multiple cores and graphics cards, or how best to use multiple GL context with just one Graphics card. I hope it helps some folks out there!

So that's it for this newsletter. I'm proud of version 0.4 and would like to acknowledge you, the community, for the support you've given in getting Equalizer to this point. A big thanks, too, to the reviewers of the Programming Guide. Version 0.4 makes Equalizer even stronger in being an open, standards-based tool for the creation of parallel OpenGL applications, and I hope you'll agree that high-performance visualization is quickly moving forwards to exciting places.

Speak soon, fellows,

Stefan