Chromium-plated

Citation

(2004), "Chromium-plated", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 53 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2004.07953hab.003

Chromium-plated

The Chromium project has been awarded a 2004 R&D 100 award by R&D magazine. This prestigious award is given annually to the “100 Most Technologically Significant New Products & Processes of the Year”. The award was made jointly to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Virginia and the commercial partner, Tungsten Graphics. Chromium provides a way for interactive two- and three-dimensional graphics applications to take full advantage of powerful, distributed, graphics-enabled clusters of off-the-shelf or commodity personal computers. It provides an extensible mechanism that allows applications to draw computer graphics imagery on such clusters with a high degree of data, display and performance scalability, and offers unique capabilities not previously available in existing systems

Chromium allows most existing applications to run without modification, and enables the creation of powerful new parallel graphics applications capable of fully exploiting the power of these clusters.

This advanced architecture draws its name from the phrase “clustered rendering”, or CR for short. CR also is the atomic symbol for the element Chromium, providing the project name.

Since its Open Source public release, the Chromium system has proved to be an extremely popular program, with more than 18,000 downloads of the software. The Chromium infrastructure has been adopted by a large number of users and is rapidly forming the basis of a great deal of clustering research at national laboratories and a number of other research institutions.

For more information please see www.tungstengraphics.com