Configuration

Overview

Equalizer uses the GPU-SD library for discovering local and remote GPUs. Based on this information, a typical configuration is dynamically compiled. The auto-configuration uses the same format as the static configuration files, and can therefore be used to create template configurations.

Usage

The command-line parameter --eq-config determines which configuration is used:

• The default value is local which uses all local GPUs queried using the cgl, glx or wgl GPU-SD module.
• --eq-config filename.eqc loads a static configuration from the given ascii file.
• --eq-config sessionname uses the dns_sd ZeroConf module of GPU-SD to query all GPUs in the subnet for the given session. The default session of the GPU-SD daemon is default. The ZeroConf hostname is used to connect the nodes.

Auto-configuration

The auto-configuration creates one display window on the local machine, and one off-screen channel for each GPU. The display window has one full-window channel used as an output channel for a single segment. It combines all GPUs into a scalability config with different layouts for each of the following scalability modes:

• 2D A dynamically load-balanced sort-first configuration using all GPUs as sources
• Simple A no-scalability configuration using only the display GPU for rendering
• Static DB A static sort-last configuration distributing the range evenly across all GPUs
• Dynamic DB A dynamically load-balanced sort-last configuration using all GPUs as sources

The picture on the right shows an auto-configuration between a Mac OS X machine running the application and an additional Linux host providing a second GPU.