Pomegranate: a fully scalable graphics architecture
Pomegranate: a fully scalable graphics architecture
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Pomegranate：完全可扩展的图形架构
DOI：
10.1145/344779.344981
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发表时间：
2000
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
P. Hanrahan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Matthew Eldridge;Homan Igehy;P. Hanrahan
Pomegranate 是一种用于多边形渲染的并行硬件架构，可提供可扩展的输入带宽、三角形速率、像素速率、纹理内存和显示带宽，同时保持即时模式接口。可扩展性的基本单元是单个图形管道，最多可以组合 64 个这样的单元。 Pomegranate 的可扩展性是通过一种新颖的“到处排序”架构实现的，该架构以平衡的方式在管道的每个阶段分配工作，使每个管道执行的工作量随着系统的扩展而保持一致。由于均衡分布，基于高速点对点链路的可扩展网络可用于管道之间的通信。 Pomegranate 使用网络来负载平衡三角形和片段独立工作，提供共享纹理内存并提供可扩展的显示系统。该架构为每个管道提供一个接口，用于发出有序的即时模式渲染命令，并支持并行 API，允许多处理器应用程序从每个接口精确排序绘图命令。详细的硬件模拟演示了下一代工作负载的性能。 Pomegranate 通过 64 条管道以 87-99% 的并行效率运行，模拟性能高达每秒 11 亿个三角形和每秒 218 亿个像素。
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.