Pomegranate: A Fully Scalable Graphics Architecture
Matthew Eldridge,
Homan Igehy, and
Pat Hanrahan,
Stanford University
Appears in Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2000)
Abstract:
Pomegranate is a parallel hardware architecture for polygon rendering
that provides scalable input bandwidth, triangle rate, pixel rate,
texture memory and display bandwidth while maintaining an
immediate-mode interface. The basic unit of scalability is a single
graphics pipeline, and up to 64 such units may be combined.
Pomegranate's scalability is achieved with a novel
"sort-everywhere" architecture that distributes work in a
balanced fashion at every stage of the pipeline, keeping the amount of
work performed by each pipeline uniform as the system scales. Because
of the balanced distribution, a scalable network based on high-speed
point-to-point links can be used for communicating between the
pipelines.
Pomegranate uses the network to load balance triangle and fragment
work independently, to provide a shared texture memory and to provide
a scalable display system. The architecture provides one interface
per pipeline for issuing ordered, immediate-mode rendering commands
and supports a parallel API that allows multiprocessor applications to
exactly order drawing commands from each interface. A detailed
hardware simulation demonstrates performance on next-generation
workloads. Pomegranate operates at 87-99% parallel
efficiency with 64 pipelines, for a simulated performance of up to
1.10 billion triangles per second and 21.8 billion pixels per second.
Talk
Paper:
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