EE385b Seminar, April 23, 1997, 12:15 (noon), Gates B08.

       EE385b Seminar

http://arith.stanford.edu/ee385b_sched.spr97.html

Title:
            Lightning: the FLASH Graphics Framebuffer

Speakers:
                 Matthew Eldridge and John Owens
                      Stanford University


Abstract:
The goal of the Stanford FLASH Graphics Project is to build high
performance graphics systems using commodity parts, based upon
emerging shared-memory parallel processors from SGI and Intel.  Flash
Graphics is made up of Argus (the software component), a parallel
graphics library based upon the interface of OpenGL and the primitive
operations of Direct3D and 3DR, and Lightning (the hardware
component), a parallel framebuffer.

Previous software parallel graphics systems have suffered from the
lack of low-latency, high-bandwidth displays.  Lightning directly
addresses this problem by providing a distributed framebuffer
accessible in parallel to maximize draw bandwidth, paired with a
unified memory architecture for minimum latency.

Each Lightning framebuffer port consists of a RAMDAC, a modest amount
of datapath hardware to transport pixels between ports, and a PCI
Pamette, a reconfigurable logic board from Digital.  The
reconfigurable logic provides both ease of design, adaptability to
future interface changes, and a flexible platform for experimentation.

This research addresses a number of current problems, including low
latency, partitionability, sufficient input bandwidth into the frame
buffer, and the use of a virtual window system.

Lightning is being developed at Stanford University by Matthew
Eldridge and John Owens, both Ph.D. candidates in electrical
engineering, and Professors Pat Hanrahan and Anoop Gupta.

Our talk will consist of an overview of the project and its
functionality as well as a description and analysis of the use of
reconfigurable logic in accomplishing the project goals.