Stefan Eilemann, founder of Equalizer, after a long day

July 2007 Edition

Hello Equalizer Community,

With so many developments over the last few weeks, I thought it was high time to get a newsletter out to you. In fact, because of the general momentum that Equalizer is currently enjoying, I'm going to be producing the newsletter regularly. Please forward this to the people in your graphics community that you feel will benefit from becoming involved.

Firstly, I'd like to thank all the folks out there in the open-source community that have - and continue to - contribute to the development of Equalizer. We have now arrived at the point where we have a mature, effective open source programming interface and resource management system for scalable OpenGL applications. This means that the industry finally has an open solution for true scalable graphics, and I'm proud of what we've achieved together.

So let's get down to it. What's new? Well, Equalizer 0.3 sees added Windows XP support and many minor 'maturity' features like anaglyphic stereo and InfiniBand support that I urge you to check out. Release notes are on the website, of course, and I'm looking forward to seeing what your response is. By the way, please take a moment to fill in our poll on Equalizer here in the left-hand column (click here if your email program does not show the poll).

As you can read in my blog , while I was at the EGPV07 conference in Lugano, Switzerland a couple of weeks ago, the people I spoke to served only to encourage me that I’m doing exactly the right thing in Equalizer by providing an open, standards-based tool for the creation of parallel OpenGL applications to push high-performance visualization. I also couldn't help noticing lately that the PC community is finally waking up to parallel programming, as multicore and multi-GPU become more mainstream. My feelings are that nVidia SLI and ATI Crossfire don't fully address the scalability; the application still uses only one core, and all data is submitted to all GPU's, thus only scaling fillrate properly. Contact us here, and let us know what you think.

Ironically for all the 'graphics-oldies' out there, Virtual Reality (VR) is definitely coming back into the limelight- even though stuff like Second Life is not strictly VR, it appears that in other industries, the availability of 'cheap' hardware is giving VR a serious shot in the arm. And to that end, I'm going to make sure that Equalizer's future roadmap takes the renaissance of VR fully into account. Talking of Equalizers roadmap; here's what's on the table right now: 1) Increasing the scalable rendering performance via 2D load balancing. This will adapt the screen-space task decomposition automatically and dynamically to optimally use all rendering resources. 2) Optimising the sort-last (DB) compositing pipeline by tuning the compositing code and an API to limit the screen-space region of interest for compositing operations.

If you were able to make it to the Apple WWDC07 last week (June 11-15), you maybe saw me there. I went with Tungsten Graphics, and we demonstrated Chromium and Equalizer on a pretty impressive display wall - (see my blog).

Speak soon, fellows,

Stefan