Chromium Renderserver (CRRS) is software infrastructure that provides the ability for one or more users to run and view image output from unmodified, interactive OpenGL and X11 applications on a remote, parallel computational platform equipped with graphics hardware accelerators via industry-standard Layer 7 network protocols and client viewers. The new contributions of this work include a solution to the problem of synchronizing X11 and OpenGL command streams, remote delivery of parallel hardware accelerated rendering, and a performance analysis of several different optimizations that are generally applicable to a variety of rendering architectures. CRRS is fully operational, Open Source software. imagery and sending it to a remote viewer.

VisIt is a richly featured visualization tool that is used to visualize some of the largest simulations ever run. The scale of these simulations requires that optimizations are incorporated into every operation VisIt performs. But the set of applicable optimizations that VisIt can perform is dependent on the types of operations being done. Complicating the issue, VisIt has a plugin capability that allows new, unforeseen components to be added, making it even harder to determine which optimizations can be applied. We introduce the concept of a contract to the standard data flow network design. This contract enables each component of the data flow network to modify the set of optimizations used. In addition, the contract allows for new components to be accommodated gracefully within VisIt's data flow network system.