[osg-users] Running multiple (independent) viewers in differentthreads

[Garfield Pig]

Hi Cully,
    It seems like the problem that split window or frame buffer to different part.
    There are two way to do this in osg.
    1.add slave camera to osgViewer::view,each camera has different graphiccontext.
    2.add osgViewer::view to osgViewer::compositeViewer,and one osgViewer::view correspond one camera,and has the same graphiccontext.


method 1 prefer the situation that each camera has different view or proj matrix but has same node tree.like Virtual Reality rendering,or cad design.
method 2 prefer each view(camera) has independent node tree.Like multi-doc edit in Word.


And the thread problem,I think you'd better do update in osg update thread,like add updateCallback to node.By this way,your thread will not have sync problem with osg render thread.


To be honest,I don't pretty understand your problem.
you'd better simplify your code to a problem example.


Qi Yu.
------------------ Original ------------------
From: "Antoine Cully"<antoinecully at hotmail.com>;
Date: Thu, May 23, 2019 00:49 AM
To: "osg-users"<osg-users at lists.openscenegraph.org>;

Subject: [osg-users] Running multiple (independent) viewers in differentthreads



Dear OSG Community, 

I searched quite a lot through the source code and the beginner guide, but I was unable to find a way to make this work, so I am posting here hoping that you could help me. 

I am developing a tool to run physical simulations (of robots) in parallel. This tool is used to run stochastic optimisation (like deep reinforcement learning) algorithms, and for this I need to be able to run several, but fully independent, simulations in parallel thanks to multithreading. This enables to collect data faster and for instance with a 32-core multithreaded CPU the speed-up factor is quite significant. 

In each simulation, I have one camera that observes the environment, and which can be used to change the behaviour of the robot running in this simulation. The camera is currently implemented as a pbuffer following closely the osgscreencapture example. The actual code of the camera can be found on github, but apprently I am not allowed to post URLs at the moment. 
The multithreading is managed by TBB (an Intel library that I have been using for 6 years now). 

If I run my code in a "sequential mode", i.e., all the simulations running one after the other, everything is going well.  However, if I run it in parallel, then I have some unstable behaviours. For instance, I can have a segmentation fault happening after a random number of simulations or suddenly after again a random number of simulations, the pbuffer cannot be created anymore (OSG displays "Error: Unable to create pbuffer."). It seems to me that "::osg::ref_ptr<::osg::GraphicsContext> pbuffer =  ::osg::GraphicsContext::createGraphicsContext(traits.get()); "
does not work in this setup. 

If I remove the cameras (and all OSG components) from my code, it is working well in parallel, but of course I would like to have cameras in my simulations. 

Ideally, I would like to run OSG in a single-thread mode and let TBB distribute the different instances of the simulator and OSG in different threads, but even with "setThreadingModel(osgViewer::ViewerBase::ThreadingModel::SingleThreaded);" it does not work. 
I tried different threading modes, with the same result.

So here is my question: 
What would be the most appropriate way to run several independent viewers and pbuffers, each in a different thread? 
The rendered scenes are really simple (no texture, just several primitive shapes) and I am only rendering a couple of frames in each simulation, so I don't need a complex threading model for OSG. 


Some information about my system:
- Ubuntu 18.04
- OSG 3.6.4

Thank you in advance for your help. 

Best regards, 

Antoine

------------------
Read this topic online here:
http://forum.openscenegraph.org/viewtopic.php?p=76134#76134





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