Parallel compositing distributes the work of assembling the final image over multiple resources. It is typically used with database decomposition, where the compositing work increases linearly with the number of resources.
Compositing in Equalizer is very flexible, and supports all major parallel compositing algorithms, including, but not limited to, direct send and binary swap. Such algorithms keep the compositing cost constant due to the parallelization across all rendering units. The example shows a three-node direct-send composition. Each rendering unit does a z-based composition of one tile, and sends the composited result to the destination channel.
Equalizer integrates well with third-party compositing libraries or hardware compositors. The Parallel Compositing Library is supported directly, if it is installed on the visualization system.
3D model courtesy of Stanford University Computer Graphics Laboratory.
