Computation Systems

This refers to the computer systems used to control the overall environment. These systems must perform the following tasks: generation of graphics for the display system, computation of the state of the environment, control and interpretation of the input and output devices. All of these tasks must be synchronized for each frame.

Several hardware configurations are currently used (in order of increasing performance):

• a single graphics workstation where the one cpu does all of the tasks
• a single graphics workstation with multiple CPUs, with each being dedicated to a different task
• a graphics workstation with several graphics engines and several cpu's. Here there might be two graphics engines, each dedicated to a single stereo view.
• a graphics workstation connected via a high speed network to a supercomputer that performs the computations while the workstation performs the rendering

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