Publications
A network interface for enabling visualization with FPGAs
Visualization in scientific computing refers to the process of transforming data produced by a simulation into graphical representations that help scientific users interpret the results. While the back-end rendering phase of this work can be performed efficiently in graphics card hardware, the front-end 'post processing' portion of visualization is currently performed entirely in software. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are an attractive option for accelerating post-processing operations because they enable users to offload computations into reconfigurable hardware. A key challenge in utilizing FPGAs for this work is developing an infrastructure that allows FPGAs to be integrated into a distributed visualization system. We propose a networked approach, where each post-processing FPGA is equipped with specialized network interface (NI) hardware that is capable of transporting graphics commands across the network to existing rendering resources. In this paper we discuss a NI for FPGAs that is comprised of a Chromium OpenGL interface, a TCP Offload Engine, and a Gigabit Ethernet module. A prototype system has been tested for a distributed isosurfacing application.