A graphics cluster consists of multiple computers connected via a network, each with one or more graphics boards, optionally connected to screens. Each render node is responsible for displaying or rendering a part of the viewport and/or a part of the scene graph of the application, depending on the type of cluster configuration setup.

ScaleViz is designed to enable cluster rendering with little or no code change to any Open Inventor based-application simply by using a configuration file.

The main goals are to allow applications to use remote/distributed graphical resources in order to increase display resolution (tiled display), immersion (arbitrary screens), fill rate (tile compositing), geometry rate (depth compositing), and more generally to aggregate the graphical power of multiple cluster nodes.

The following sections present the basic principles of cluster rendering, cluster hardware, system requirements and setup, as well as supported cluster configurations with several configuration examples.