An efficient parallel ray tracing scheme for distributed memory parallel computers

Abstract

The ray-tracing algorithm produces high quality images by taking multiple luminous effects into account. Hence, it requires many computations and a large memory capacity. The use of parallel machines is a solution in order to reduce significantly the synthesis time. Distributed Memory Parallel Computers offer an interesting performance/cost ratio but need to distribute computations and data. This paper is a study of the implementation of the ray-tracing algorithm on a Distributed Memory Parallel Computer. An original solution, based on the association of a data parallelism approach with a task parallelism one, is presented. A dynamic load redistribution mechanism allows us to ensure a good load balance during the synthesis phase. At the end of the paper, some results of our transputer implementation are presented.