Collage  1.4.0
High-performance C++ library for developing object-oriented distributed applications.
Collage Documentation

Table of Contents

Introduction

Collage is a cross-platform C++ library for building heterogenous, distributed applications. Among other things, it is the cluster backend for the Equalizer parallel rendering framework. Collage provides an abstraction of different network connections, peer-to-peer messaging, node discovery, synchronization and high-performance, object-oriented, versioned data distribution. Collage is designed for low-overhead multi-threaded execution which allows applications to easily exploit multi-core architectures.

The API documentation can be found on eyescale.github.io. As with any open source project, the available source code, in particular the unit tests provide a reference for developing applications.

Technical questions can be posted to the Equalizer 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.

Features

Collage provides different levels of abstraction to facilitate the development distributed applications:

  • Network Connections: stream-oriented point-to-point and reliable multicast connections for TCP/IP, InfiniBand RDMA, UDT, events, named and anonymous pipes, memory buffers and reliable multicast over UDP.
  • Peer-to-Peer Messaging: Endian-safe node-to-node message communication with thread-aware message dispatch.
  • Synchronization: Distributed barriers and synchronous messaging.
  • Object data distribution: high-performance, object-oriented, versioned data distribution for C++ objects based on delta serialization.
  • Detailed Changelog

Building

Collage is a cross-platform library, designed to run on any modern operating system, including all Unix variants and the Windows operating system. Collage uses CMake to create a platform-specific build environment. The following platforms and build environments are tested:

  • Linux: Ubuntu 14.04, RHEL 6.6 (Makefile, Ninja)
  • Windows: 7 (Visual Studio 2012)
  • Mac OS X: 10.8 (Makefile, Ninja)

Building from source is as simple as: 

git clone https://github.com/Eyescale/Collage.git
mkdir Collage/build
cd Collage/build
cmake ..
make