Taylor, Samuel2003-07-032004-05-192011-01-052004-05-192011-01-051999http://hdl.handle.net/1885/40732http://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/40732Comet is an interactive visualisation tool, which supports real-time visualisation and exploration of very large Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) on commodity workstations. Comet is designed to be portable across a range of different hardware architectures and network environments, and has been implemented using a novel combination of standard software components. A tile-based Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) is used to maintain and distribute a large DTM across a number of different machines. The soft real-time performance requirements of an interactive application were a significant challenge, and have caused us to employ a range of optimisation techniques. In particular, a series of caching strategies is used in conjunction with multi-threading to maximise client rendering performance. This technical report outlines the design and structure of Comet, and discusses a number of implementation issues. It also presents a limited set of performance measurements, and some recommendations for future development.136637 bytes356 bytesapplication/pdfapplication/octet-streamen-AUdistributed visualisation tooldigital terrain modelsearth observationfly-throughsOpenGLTR-CS1999