Implementation and Evaluation of Parallel Mesa Library

This paper describes the implementation and performance evaluation of a 3D graphics library that can be readily linked with parallel applications to provide run-time visualization on large-scale message-passing parallel machines, such as Intel Paragon. The prototype implementation is currently fully operational, and is based on a public-domain OpenGL implementation Mesa, and a sort-last parallelization strategy. Through a detailed performance analysis, we show that the scalability of the current prototype is close to the theoretical limit for the given hardware architecture, and that further performance improvement on the same platform is unlikely to change the scalability characteristics, especially when the number of rendering processors involved is large. The other contribution of this work is that we develop a unified framework to describe parallel compositing algorithms and show that two popular parallel compositing algorithms, binary swapping and parallel pipeline compositing, ar..