Document Type thesis Author Name Banerjee, Kutty S URN etd-052305-160204 Title Remote Execution for 3D Graphics Degree MS Department Computer Science Advisors Emmanuel Agu, Advisor Fernando Colon Osorio, Reader Michael Gennert, Department Head Keywords computer graphics mobile devices Date of Presentation/Defense 2005-05-23 Availability unrestricted Abstract
Mobile clients such as PDAs, laptops, wrist watches, smart phones are
rapidly emerging in the consumer market and an increasing number of graphics applications
are being developed for them. However, current hardware technology limits the
processing power on these mobile devices and wireless network bandwidth can be
scarce and unreliable. A modern photorealistic graphics application is resource-hungry,
consumes large amounts of cpu cycles, memory and network bandwidth if
distributed. Besides running them on mobile devices may also diminish their
battery power in the process. Bulk of graphics computations involve floating point operations
and the lack of hardware support for such on PDAs imposes further restrictions.
Remote execution, wherein part or the entire rendering process is offloaded to a powerful
surrogate server is an attractive solution. We propose pipeline-splitting,
a paradigm whereby 15 sub-stages of the graphics
pipeline are isolated and instrumented with networking code such that it can run on either
a graphics client or a surrogate server. To validate our concepts,
we instrument Mesa3D, a popular implementation of the OpenGL graphics
to support pipeline-splitting, creating Remote Mesa (RMesa). We further extend the Remote
Execution model to provide an analytical model for predicting the rendering time and memory
consumption involved in Remote Execution. Mobile devices have limited battery power. Therefore,
it is important to understand if during Remote Execution, communication is more power consuming than
computation. In order to study the same, we develop PowerSpy, a Real Time Power Profiler for I/O devices
and applications.
Finally, we add Remote Execution to an existing Distributed Graphics Framework targeted for mobile devices, namely, MADGRAF.
In addition to Remote Execution, MADGRAF has another policy known as the Transcoder Based Approach in which the original
3D graphics image is modified to suite the mobile devices' rendering capacity. Though this speeds up the rendering process,
it affects photorealism. We propose an intelligent runtime decision making engine, Intelligraph, which evaluates the runtime
performance of the mobile client and decides between Remote Execution and the Transcoder Based Approach.
Files banerjeek.pdf
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