A step towards making local and remote desktop applications interoperable with high-resolution tiled display walls

Abstract

The visual output from a personal desktop application is limited to the resolution of the local desktop and display. This prevents the desktop application from utilizing the resolution provided by high-resolution tiled display walls. Additionally, most desktop applications are not designed for the distributed and parallel architecture of display walls, limiting the availability of such applications in these kinds of environments. This paper proposes the Network Accessible Compute (NAC) model, transforming personal computers into compute services for a set of display-side visualization clients. The clients request output from the compute services, which in turn start the relevant personal desktop applications and use them to produce output that can be transferred into display-side compatible formats by the NAC service. NAC services are available to the visualization clients through a live data set, which receives requests from visualization nodes, translates these to compute messages and forwards them to available compute services. Compute services return output to visualization nodes for rendering. Experiments conducted on a 28-node, 22-megapixel, display wall show that the time used to rasterize a 350-page PDF document into 550 megapixels of image tiles and display these image tiles on the display wall is 74.7 seconds (PNG) and 20.7 seconds (JPG) using a single computer with a quad-core CPU as a NAC service. When increasing this into 28 quad-core CPU computers, this time is reduced to 4.2 seconds (PNG) and 2.4 seconds (JPG). This shows that the application output from personal desktop computers can be made interoperable with high-resolution tiled display walls, with good performance and independent of the resolution of the local desktop and display. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.