A Distributed System for Near-Real-Time Display of Shaded Three-Dimensional Graphics

We present a distributed system that provides low-cost, interactive response for three-dimensional graphics applications. The system runs on commonly available hardware, which consists of a set of distributed workstations connected by a mediumbandwidth network. Problems such as heterogeneous processors, time-shared use of the workstations, and non-uniform image complexity are addressed through a load-balancing algorithm that achieves effective parallel speedups, allowing nearreal-time response in interactive applications. A scheme for exploiting frame-to-frame coherence, which is characteristic of many interactive applications, further enhances the performance. The images rendered may be displayed at near-real-time rates on an inexpensive, 8-bit frame buffer through the use of a novel, color-quantization scheme that avoids recomputing a color mapping for every frame of an animation sequence . Several applications of the system are described, and a video showing nearreal-time interaction with these applications will be presented.