EGL Eye: OpenGL Visualization without an X Server

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2024-07-07 00:30:05

If you’re like me, you have a GPU-accelerated in-situ visualization toolkit that you need to run on the latest-generation supercomputer. Or maybe you have a fantastic OpenGL application that you want to deploy on a server farm for offline rendering.

Even though you have access to all that amazing GPU power, you’re often out of luck when it comes to GPU-accelerated rendering. The reason is that it’s not sufficient to enable OpenGL rendering on the GPUs, but it also requires running an X server on each node. For more information, see Interactive Supercomputing with In-Situ Visualization on Tesla GPUs.

Especially in an HPC setting, system administrators are often reluctant to have X server processes running on the compute nodes. Until recently, this was the only way to manage an OpenGL context. That’s where EGL comes in.

Initially driven by the requirements of the embedded space, the NVIDIA driver release 331 introduced EGL support, enabling context creation for OpenGL ES applications without the need for running an X server. However, it was still not possible to run legacy OpenGL applications under such contexts.