Chromium Introduction

Chromium is a system for interactive rendering on clusters of workstations.  It is a completely extensible architecture, so that parallel rendering algorithms can be implemented on clusters with ease. 

Among Chromium's features are

Chromium is derived from the WireGL project. Even if you're completely happy with your WireGL setup, we recommend replacing it with Chromium for several reasons:

This documentation serves as both a reference guide and tutorial for using and extending Chromium. See the the Where to get help link for other resources.

Credits

Chromium is mainly the product of Greg Humphreys.  However, a few other individuals deserve special mention.  Ian Buck wrote the original state tracking and bucketing system for WireGL, which the Chromium "tilesort" SPU and "state_tracker" library are loosely based on.  Ian has also been in charge of the WireGL release process and maintenance for its 80+ users.  Matthew Eldridge made significant improvements to WireGL's networking libraries and the overall system design, and his design philosophy (if not his code) lives on in Chromium.  Chris Niederauer did most of the implementation of the OpenGL extensions, including all of the NVIDIA-specific ones.  He also designed the Chromium logo and did a lot of really useful slave labor for us last summer when we were building our cluster.

For the beta and 1.0 through 1.4 releases Brian Paul and Alan Hourihane of Tungsten Graphics, Inc. contributed much of the development. Brian and Alan Matsuoka (of Red Hat) made many contributions to the Chromium 1.4 through 1.7 releases.