Worcester Polytechnic Institute Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Title page for ETD etd-052305-160204


Document Typethesis
Author NameBanerjee, Kutty S
URNetd-052305-160204
TitleRemote Execution for 3D Graphics
DegreeMS
DepartmentComputer Science
Advisors
  • Emmanuel Agu, Advisor
  • Fernando Colon Osorio, Reader
  • Michael Gennert, Department Head
  • Keywords
  • computer graphics
  • mobile devices
  • Date of Presentation/Defense2005-05-23
    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

  • Browse by Author | Browse by Department | Search all available ETDs

    [WPI] [Library] [Home] [Top]

    Questions? Email etd-questions@wpi.edu
    Maintained by webmaster@wpi.edu