Distributed OpenSceneGraph

Abstract

This thesis presents the design and implementation of Distributed OpenSceneGraph. Distributed OpenSceneGraph is a graphics visualization toolkit for distributed applications, in particular for tiled display wall systems. Distributed OpenSceneGraph allows for flexible and reasonably transparent development of distributed graphics applications by introducing the notion of distributed nodes into the well know OpenSceneGraph graphics toolkit.

By letting the Distributed OpenSceneGraph only concern itself with the state of individual scene graph nodes we achieve a great degree of flexibility. It is not in any way enforced that the local scene graph copies in any of the processes that make up the distributed system must be identical, nor is it necessary that all or any of the distributed nodes in the total distributed application be present in a processes scene graph copy. This enables an application developer to create applications with radically different scenes while still distributing what needs to be.

An important focus when implementing Distributed OpenSceneGraph was transparency. Therefore a lot of effort has been laid into enabling application developers to use Distributed OpenSceneGraph with only a few extra function calls beyond what they would have encountered when creating undistributed OpenSceneGraph applications.

The flexibility and transparency introduced to visualization of application data makes Distributed OpenSceneGraph suitable for use in the development of distributed graphics applications.

At time of writing the Distributed OpenSceneGraph library is unfortunately not quite finished. However a number of measurements and possible solutions are presented to show the path onwards.