Distributed processing of large triangle meshes

Thanks to modern high-resolution acquisition techniques, 3D digital representations of real objects are easily made of millions, or even billions, of elements. Processing and analysing such large datasets is often a non trivial task, due to specific software and hardware requirements. Our system allows to process large triangle meshes by exploiting nothing more than a standard Web browser. A graphical interface allows to select among available algorithms and to stack them into complex pipelines, while a central engine manages the overall execution by exploiting both hardware and software provided by a distributed network of servers. As an additional feature, our system allows to store work ows and to make them publicly available. A semantic-driven search mechanism is provided to allow the retrieval of specific work ows. Besides the technological contribution, an innovative mesh transfer protocol avoids possible bottlenecks during the transmission of data across scattered servers. Also, distributed parallel processing is enabled thanks to an innovative divide and conquer approach. A simplification algorithm based on this paradigm proves that the overhead due to data transmission is negligible.