From: steve@hsvaic.boeing.com (Steve Tanner)
Subject: TECH (Sort of) Intergraph Workstations
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 92 10:37:03 CST



Hello,

I'm looking for some ideas on how to exploit some equipment we have at
our disposal.  We have a 100 or so Intergraph workstations that are,
for the most part, unused at night.  We have a piece of software that
farms out tasks to these machines so that many images can be generated
at once.  We are using this technique to help build a film of
animation which contains many thousands of images.  Currently, there
are no direct links from these workstations into any sort of VR tools
that I'm aware of, but I would like to find some way to use the
processing power here for VR work.

I have several ideas, but would like to hear from any of you.  One
idea I have is to use the machines as a sort of preemptive caching
mechanism of images sort of like the page set of an operating system.
Another would be to use the parallelism not so much for the image
generation, but for other intensive processing such as behavior
modeling and collision detection.  Perhaps each major object in the VR
could use a processor of its own and interact with the other
processors (major objects) without the intervention of a master
processor.  A display processor would then query each object about its
state in order to generate a representative display of the VR (or
maybe each object signals the display processor when its position has
changed).  How else might this power be exploited?  Any ideas?  Ever
done anything like this?  What would you do with this equipment?  

Thanks for all responses

Steve Tanner
steve@hsvaic.boeing.com