Section: Software
FlowVR
Participants : Jean-Denis Lesage, Bruno Raffin [ correspondant ] .
The goal of the FlowVR library is to provide users with the necessary tools to develop and run high performance interactive applications on PC clusters and Grids. The main target applications include virtual reality and scientific visualization. FlowVR enforces a modular programming that leverages software engineering issues while enabling high performance executions on distributed and parallel architectures.
The FlowVR software suite has today 3 main components:
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FlowVR: The core middleware library. FlowVR relies on data-flow hierarchical component model. Developing a FlowVR application is a two step process. First, modules are developed. Modules encapsulate a piece of code, imported from an existing application or developed from scratch. The code can be a multi-threaded or parallel, as FlowVR enables parallel code coupling. In a second step, modules are mapped on the target architecture and assembled into a network to define how data are exchanged. This network can make use of advanced features, from simple routing operations to complex message filtering or synchronization operations.
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FlowVR Render: A parallel rendering library. FlowVR Render proposes a framework to take advantage of the power offered by graphics clusters to drive display walls or immersive multi-projector environments like Caves. It relies on an original approach making an intensive use of hardware shaders. FlowVR Render comes with a port of the MPlayer Movie Player. This enables to play movies on a multi display environment. This application also a good example of the potential of FlowVR and FlowVR Render.
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VTK FlowVR: a VTK / FlowVR / FlowVR Render coupling library. VTK FlowVR enables to render VTK applications using FlowVR Render with minimal modifications of the original code. VTK FlowVR enables to encapsulate VTK code into FlowVR modules to get access to the FlowVR capabilities for modularizing and distributing VTK processings.
The FlowVR suite is freely available under a GP/LGPL licence at http://flowvr.sf.net with a full documentation and related publications.
