Overview

Equalizer is the standard middleware to create parallel OpenGL-based applications. It enables applications to benefit from multiple graphics cards, processors and computers to scale rendering performance, visual quality and display size. An Equalizer-based application runs unmodified on any visualization system, from a simple workstation to large scale graphics clusters, multi-GPU workstations and Virtual Reality installations.

Compatibility

Equalizer is written in standard C++. It is running on Windows XP, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X systems. Equalizer is written in a portable way, and has been tested on 32 bit and 64 bit little endian and big endian systems.

Use Cases

An Equalizer application can be configured at runtime to be used in a wide range of parallel rendering scenarios, for example:

• Display Walls
• Virtual Reality Installations
• Multi-GPU Workstations
• Scalable Visualization Clusters

• Oil & Gas Exploration
• Medical Imaging
• Scientific Visualization
• 3D Content Creation

Features

• Parallel rendering on distributed memory and shared memory systems
• Extensive documentation, 91-page Programming Guide
• Active, passive and anaglyphic stereo rendering
• Distributed, versioned object support
• Head tracking API supporting multiple observers
• Software and hardware-based swapbarrier support for view synchronization on multi-GPU display systems
• 2D (sort-first, screen-space or SFR), DB (sort-last or database), stereo, DPlex (time-multiplex or AFR), pixel and subpixel (FSAA, DOF) task decomposition
• Tile-based reassembly for sort-first, pixel and stereo recomposition.
• Flexible recomposition engine for parallel compositing, including, but not limited to, direct send and binary swap sort-last compositing
• Z-based sort-last compositing of polygonal data
• Support for ordered alpha-based compositing of volumetric data

Licensing

Equalizer is licensed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL), which allows distribution with commercial and open-source applications. Commercial support and development services are available from Eyescale Software GmbH.

Top image copyright Realtime Technology AG, 2008.

Bottom image courtesy University of Siegen, 2008.