Vizard plugin for CAVE

[apenngrace]

Hi, I am a grad student at Villanova working on Villanova's virtual reality cave project. We have Vizard Enterprise running in the CAVE.

I am working on a plugin to work with Point Grey Ladybug video, but I am trying to get a better understanding of how clustering works. I have a few questions:

1.) What determines the number of Vizard instances that will be launched on a given machine?
- Our CAVE setup is we have a: left wall, front wall, right wall, and either left & right floor or ceiling.
- We have a master node and a render node connected on a local network. The render node is plugged into 6 projectors. In Windows 7, that maps to 5 logical monitors (the front wall is a combined surface).
- I am currently running the cluster master on the render node (mainly b/c we can't get it working from the head node). When I run the cluster master, I am selecting localhost and also specifying a count of 4. What does the count mean? Is each of the 4 "count" a client?
- I am finding that when I launch my plugin, I am getting 5 instances of the plugin instantiated (it is instantiated only once in the python code). Why is it instantiated 5 times instead of 4 times (the number I plugged into "count")?

2.) Is it necessary to have multiple instances of Vizard launching in our kind of setup? Is there perhaps a better way?
- I am asking because I want to limit the number plugin instances that are in memory on a given machine. The video data I am dealing with is very large.

[Jeff]

1) If you're running a local cluster, there is a master instance in addition to the client count.

2) Clustering will allow you to leverage multiple Quadro GPU's. It's also possible to setup everything as a single instance (no cluster) with sub-windows for each wall.