Multipipe SDK 3.2 Reference
Name
MPKIntro - Overview of OpenGL Multipipe SDK
Header File
- #include <mpk/mpk.h>
- Welcome to the OpenGL Multipipe Software Development Kit !
- More and more creative, technical and business professionals are using multipipe environments like the SGI Reality Center to gain insight into their data. These environments typically use multiple graphics pipes drawing into multiple displays, creating a challenge for the application developer as well as for the users to efficiently manage their available graphics resources.
- To help application developers and center operators solve these issues, SGI has developped OpenGL Multipipe SDK (MPK), a programming interface that leaves view-specific information to be specified outside of the application, at run-time (via a simple ASCII configuration file). MPK thus enables the application to take advantage of the scalability provided by additional pipes and other scalable graphics hardware, as well as to support immersive environments.
- MPK provides your application with the following specific features :
- Run-time Configurability
- Run-time Scalability
- Integrated support for Scalable Graphics Hardware
- Integrated support for Stereo and Immersive environments
- The ease of configuring your application to accomodate multiple hadware pipes, head-tracking devices and different display areas makes MPK ideal for use with immersive environments, where portability is a premium issue. MPK product components are :
Application Programming Interface
- MPK programming model enables programmers to adapt their OpenGL graphics application to support multipipe environments.
- MPK essentially provides a C functional interface to the
MPKConfig data structure, which describes the rendering resources of the application as a hierarchy of hardware graphics pipes (MPKPipe), GLX software rendering threads (MPKWindow) and OpenGL framebuffer rendering areas (MPKChannel), together with the parallel decomposition schemes to be applied on these resources (MPKCompound).
- Examples are installed under the /
usr/ share/ Multipipe/ src directory.
Configuration File Interface
- MPK simple ASCII File Format interface is designed for Reality Center operators to configure MPK applications to run in their environment, by specifying how the framebuffer resources are mapped onto the physical projection areas, together with the parallel decomposition schemes to be applied by the application.
See also
MPKChannel, MPKCompound, MPKConfig, MPKPipe, MPKWindow