Parallel Compositing Library

The Parallel Compositing library enables developers to write scalable 3D graphics applications. The library does sort-last compositing, and works on both clusters and SMP machines. The API aims to be the MPI for parallel compositing.

The goals of this project

To continue evolution of the API specification as an open standard, such that it meets the needs of the parallel graphics community.
To develop an optimized cross-platform reference implementation of the API.
To encourage development of parallel graphics applications based on this API.

News

[20 Nov 2008]

ParaComp Release 1.2 is OUT!. Download it from SourceForge. Highlights of this release : integration with Equalizer, HDR compositing (16 and 32 bit floats), and an accumulation operator. Plus bug fixes, support for additional platforms. More information here(ChangeLog).

[16 Jun 2008]

Equalizer (version 0.5.2) supports using Paracomp for doing volume rendering. An experimental alpha blending operator in Paracomp allows this. More information, here.

[16 May 2008]

Equalizer (version 0.5.1) includes Paracomp as a compositing backend. An experimental extension in Paracomp allows this. More information, here.

[22 Nov 2007]

Fixed an interoperability issue with HP-MPI. Thanks to George Leaver(University of Manchester) for finding the cause and reporting the bug. Change comitted to the trunk.

[20 Nov 2007]

Validated to work with OFED 1.2. Compiler fixes in developer branch.

[12 Nov 2007]

Parallel Compositing Library wins the HPCwire Editor's Choice Award for "Best Price/Performance Visualization Product or Technology" at SC07, Reno! Read the announcement here.

[29 Aug 2007]

Release 1.1 of the library is available for download from SourceForge now! Note that this is a source-only release; it contains the entire source code for the Parallel Compositing Library, plus sample programs.

Features

The current library implementation has the following features:

Depth compositing, Ordered alpha compositing
Screen space compositing
Native support for InfiniBand
Fast compositing code for Xeon/Opteron CPUs(x86_64)
OpenGL contexts as source of pixels

Download

Release 1.2 of the library is available for download from SourceForge.

A set of sample programs is included in the source tree of the library. Please look at the "samples" directory after downloading.

The project uses Subversion, and the sources can be viewed here. If the release version does not work for you, then please download the latest stable snapshot using anonymous SVN, as follows:

# svn co https://paracomp.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/paracomp/trunk paracomp

Resources

Reference Guide: A user guide for the library can be downloaded from this link. This document describes the concepts that an application programmer needs to understand, describes the samples, and has coding tips too. The document is primarily aimed at users of HP's Scalable Visualization Array product, but most of the content is applicable on any generic cluster.

API Specification: The complete specification for v1.01 of the API is available as a PDF document

Whitepaper: A whitepaper about the benefits of the library and how to use it is available from this link

Benchmark Framework: A framework to benchmark the performance of any implementation of the API is available from this webpage. This benchmark was contributed by BME Innovation and Knowledge Centre of Information Technology.

Who is using the library?

The University of Manchester has developed versions of AVS/Express for multi CPU and GPU systems. Parallel volume rendering and sort last compositing of geometry is supported. The project is supported by KGT.

Image shows the Armadillo dataset (from the UTCT Data Archive). The 252x256x953 dataset is distributed over 4 nodes.

The Technical University of Budapest has developed several projects using the library:

The source code for each of these projects is available on the respective pages.

Mailing Lists

The following mailing lists are available from the SourceForge project page

paracomp-announce - Major announcements related to the project
paracomp-users - For the users of the API
paracomp-devel - For the developers of the API
paracomp-spec - Discussions related to the Parallel Compositing library specification, including change proposals
paracomp-commits - SVN commit notifications

Please subscribe and participate !

Other Information

Project related information like SVN, bugs, etc are accessible from the project page at SourceForge.