Parallel Rendering

Cross-Segment Load-Balancing

Equalizer is the standard middleware to create and deploy parallel OpenGL-based applications. It enables applications to benefit from multiple graphics cards, processors and computers to scale rendering performance, visual quality and display size. An Equalizer-based application runs unmodified on any visualization system, from a simple workstation to large scale graphics clusters, multi-GPU workstations and Virtual Reality installations.

Benefits

• Increased Performance, Visual Quality and Display Size: Equalizer contains the essence of 10+ years of experience in parallel and scalable rendering, easily integrated into your application.
• Fast Path for Parallel OpenGL Applications: Equalizer is minimally invasive and provides the natural parallel execution model to exploit the parallelism of multicore, multi-GPU workstations and graphics clusters.
• Feature-Rich Framework: Equalizer contains state-of-the-art scalable rendering algorithms, and its open development model ensures constant improvement. Equalizer applications are flexible and deployable in many, rapidly changing environments.
• Future-Proof: An active development community and a liberal open source license provide cutting-edge features and ensure the safety of your investment.

Features

Applications written using the Equalizer framework benefit from the following features:

• Flexibility: An Equalizer application is configured at run-time, allowing the same executable to run optimally on any configuration -- from laptops to large scale visualization clusters, driving a single window or a six-sided CAVE while using one or multiple graphics cards to render each view.
• Large Data Visualization: An Equalizer application can aggregate the power of multiple processors, graphics cards and computers to scale the rendering performance, visual quality and display size. This allows virtually any data set to be rendered at any resolution at interactive framerates, given sufficient hardware resources.
• Support for Virtual Reality: Equalizer applications can run seamlessly in Virtual Reality installations using active and passive stereo rendering, as well as head tracking for one or multiple observers.
• Data Distribution: Equalizer simplifies and optimizes the data distribution needed for cluster-based execution. The versioned distributed objects offered be Equalizer are optimally suited for interactive rendering of dynamic data sets on large-scale visualization clusters.

Compatibility

Equalizer is a cross-platform toolkit, available for Linux, Windows XP and Mac OS X and supports both 32-bit and 64-bit execution.

Equalizer does not interfere with the application's OpenGL rendering code. Equalizer requires at a minimum OpenGL version 1.1 in order to run, but uses later OpenGL features and extensions where available.

The Equalizer framework is licensed under the LGPL open source license, which allows free usage in commercial and open source projects. Any changes to the framework itself have to be contributed back to open source.

Consulting, software development service and support are available from Eyescale Software GmbH.

Project Mission

Equalizer is an open platform for high-performance visualization:

• Vendor Independence: The development is not governed by a single company. We work with several industry-leading hardware and software vendors as well as research institutions on improving Equalizer.
• Open Source: Equalizer uses a liberal license which allows usage in both open source and commercial products. The license ensures progress on the core framework and protects the ISV's investment in the future.
• Open Community: We encourage the usage in custom projects and welcome contributions to Equalizer by the community. We contribute our experience in parallel rendering back to the OpenGL community.