显示屏集群管理 Display Wall Cluster Management - 原版教材电子书.doc

Display Wall Cluster Management Grant Wallace Computer Science Department, Princeton University gwallace@ Introduction The trend of building display walls with commodity projectors and PCs is appealing because it can ride on the commodity technology and cost curves. However, when building a scalable system, parallel algorithms and fast networking aren’t the only issues; one has to keep in mind the increased complexity of cluster management tasks. This paper presents our experiences in scaling our display wall system from 8 to 24 projectors with an emphasis on the administration and user tools and techniques we developed to help the process. In March 1998, Princeton built its first display wall with an 18’ ( 8’ rear projection screen and 8 Proxima LCD commodity projectors (figure 1a). This system had a resolution of 4000x1500 pixels and was driven by a network of 8 Pentium II workstations running Windows NT [4]. In November 2000, we scaled the display up with 24 new Compaq MP1800 DLP projectors and a network of 24 Pentium III workstations running Windows 2000 (figure 1b). This brought our new resolution to 6000x3000 pixels [3]. Figure 1: Projector Setups of the Princeton Display Wall. Left (a): First Generation System with 8 Projectors Right (b): Second Generation System with 24 Projectors In this effort, we found that the techniques that were sufficient for 8 projectors became excessively time consuming and labor intensive for 24 projectors. Of course, projector alignment was one of our first stumbling blocks [2]. But once we began to develop automated methods for alignment, it became obvious that some of the other everyday administrative tasks were very time consuming. There was the need to maintain the machines, control the projectors without built in computer interfaces, update drivers, manipulate dialog boxes and present an intuitive and simple interface to the daily user. Original 8 Node Display Wall Management Overview There are many tools available to hel