Name of the thesis: Cluster Rendering with Commodity Hardware in the Experimental Virtual Environment

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the dierent alternatives for replacing the rendering equipment in the Experimental Virtual Environment (EVE) at Helsinki Uni-versity of Technology (HUT). The work was divided into three parts, starting with the analysis of dierent hardware alternatives, then building the chosen system and nally choosing and evaluating the most suitable software architecture for the system. A clus-ter of commodity hardware PCs using software-genlocked active stereo was chosen as the basis of the new system. In consequence, the work concentrated on setting up a cluster of commodity hardware PCs and installing that system to the virtual environment. The video signals from the rendering PCs were synchronized using Open Source software (SoftGenLock) and the polygon data was transferred through a Gigabit Ethernet network with a particular software library that was developed for this purpose, namely Broadcast GL (BGL)