Integration of a Commodity Cluster into an Existing 4-Wall Display System

Not all virtual reality applications today require the power or expense of single large visualization “supercomputers”. Factors such as frame rate and polygon count have a major impact upon the performance of a VR application. Increasingly, low cost commodity consumer electronics and computing technology are becoming powerful enough to present an acceptable level of graphics performance. Already, commodity PCs are driving virtual reality workbenches with stereo and tracking options. The next step is to have them drive multi-screen environments. We present an experiment motivated by the low cost per performance of PC commodity clusters. The experiment is to replace a visualization super-computing platform driving a 4-wall immersive display system [1] with a PC commodity cluster. We describe the system, implementation and experimental testing in the paper.