Chromium : The open-source project behind Google Chrome

Chromium is a system for interactive rendering on clusters of graphics workstations. Various parallel rendering techniques such as sort-first and sort-last may be implemented with Chromium. Furthermore, Chromium allows filtering and manipulation of OpenGL command streams for non-invasive rendering algorithms.

Chromium runs on Microsoft Windows and several types of Unix such as Linux and IRIX.

Chromium is derived from the WireGL project. Even if you’re completely happy with your WireGL setup, we recommend replacing it with Chromium for several reasons:

• Numerous bugs have been found and fixed since the last WireGL release.
• The new configuration system will make setting up and reconfiguring your tiled display much simpler.
• Chromium has many, many more features.

[ Key Features ]

• Sort-first (tiled) rendering – the frame buffer is subdivided into rectangular tiles which may be rendered in parallel by the hosts of a rendering cluster.
• Sort-last (Z-compositing) rendering – the 3D dataset is broken into N parts which are rendered in parallel by N processors. The resulting images are composited together according to their Z buffers to form the final image.
• Hybrid parallel rendering – sort-first and sort-last rendering may be combined into a hybrid configuration.
• OpenGL command stream filtering – OpenGL command streams may be intercepted and modified by a stream processing unit (SPU) to implement non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) effects, etc. Here’s an interesting example.
• Many OpenGL programs can be used with Chromium without modification.
• One can write Chromium-specific applications which perform parallel rendering with the aid of special synchronization primitives.
• Chromium runs on Linux, IRIX, AIX, SunOS and Windows-based systems.
• Chromium is an open-source project.

[ Detailed Introduction ]

Over the past few years, progress in consumer graphics card capabilities and desktop CPU performance, coupled with advances in high-performance networks, have enabled a new generation of supercomputer: the commodity graphics cluster. These new clusters, built from collections of off-the-shelf Pcs outfitted with consumer graphics cards, offer unprecedented power for the rendering and display of 3D graphics. However, the application programming interface to these systems was not designed for parallel clusters. Chromium provides a common parallel graphics programming interface to support such clusters. In addition, it allows most existing serial applications to run without modification, and enables creation of powerful new parallel graphics applications capable of fully exploiting the power of these clusters.

Chromium provides a number of key capabilities, uniquely combined into a single package

• Streaming graphics pipeline based on the industry standard OpenGL API
• Support for multiple physical display devices clustered together, such as”powerwall” displays
• Support for aggregation of the output of multiple graphics cards to drive a single display at higher levels of performance/capability

The Chromium infrastructure has been adopted by a large number of users and is rapidly forming the basis of a great deal of clustering research. Chromium’s capabilities have not only proven to be useful on graphics clusters, but the technologies are also useful on the single desktop PC.

[ Related Links ]

A Beginner’s Guide to Chromium

What’s New in Chromium?

Main Chromium documentation

Chromium Frequently Asked Questions

Google Chrome Official Online Help

Google Chrome Comic Books

[ Official Download ]