SHARC: A scalable 3D graphics virtual appliance delivery framework in cloud

Recent advances in virtualization technology and wide acceptance of the cloud computing model are having significant impact on the software service industry. Though cloud computing and virtualization technology have been widely applied in supporting the information processing needs of conventional enterprise and business applications, there has been a little success to-date in enabling realtime 3D virtual appliances in the cloud. This paper aims to address this deficiency by presenting SHARC, a solution for enabling scalable support of realtime 3D virtual appliances in a cloud computing environment. The solution uses a scalable pipelined processing infrastructure which consists of three processing networks according to the principle of division-of-labor, a virtualization server network for running 3D virtual appliances, a graphics rendering network for processing graphics rendering workload with load balancing, and a media streaming network for transcoding rendered frames into H.264/MPEG-4 media streams and streaming the media streams to a cloud user. The paper describes a prototype implementation of SHARC and reports test results that demonstrate the viability of this approach.