Introduction

Collage is a cross-platform C++ library for building heterogenous, distributed applications. Among others, it is the cluster backend for the Equalizer parallel rendering framework. Collage provides an abstraction of different network connections, peer-to-peer messaging, node discovery, synchronization and high-performance, object-oriented, versioned data distribution. Collage is designed for low-overhead multi-threaded execution which allows applications to easily exploit multi-core architectures.

The API documentation can be found on eyescale.github.io. As with any open source project, the available source code, in particular the unit tests provide a reference for developing applications.

Technical questions can be posted to the Equalizer Developer Mailing List, or directly to [email protected].

Commercial support, custom software development and porting services are available from Eyescale. Please contact [email protected] for further information.

Features

Collage provides different levels of abstraction to facilitate the development distributed applications:

• Network Connections: stream-oriented point-to-point and reliable multicast connections for TCP/IP, InfiniBand RDMA, UDT, events, named and anonymous pipes, memory buffers and reliable multicast over UDP.
• Peer-to-Peer Messaging: Endian-safe node-to-node message communication with thread-aware message dispatch.
• Synchronization: Distributed barriers and synchronous messaging.
• Object data distribution: high-performance, object-oriented, versioned data distribution for C++ objects based on delta serialization.
• Detailed @ref Changelog

Building

Collage is a cross-platform library, designed to run on any modern operating system, including all Unix variants and the Windows operating system. It requires a C++11 compiler and uses CMake to create a platform-specific build environment. The following platforms and build environments are tested:

• Linux: Ubuntu 16.04, RHEL 6.8 (Makefile, Ninja)
• Windows: 7 (Visual Studio 2012)
• Mac OS X: 10.9 (Makefile, Ninja)

Building from source is as simple as:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Eyescale/Collage.git
mkdir Collage/build
cd Collage/build
cmake -GNinja .. -DCLONE_SUBPROJECTS=ON
ninja