An Efficient Parallel Ray Tracing Scheme for Highly Parallel Architectures

The production of realistic image generated by computer requires a huge amount of computation and a large memory capacity. The use of highly parallel computers allows this process to be performed faster. Distributed memory parallel computers (DMPCs), such as hypercubes or transputer-based machines, offer an attractive performance/cost ratio when the load balancing has been balance and the partition of the data domain has been performed. This paper presents a parallel ray tracing algorithm for DMPC using a Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) which solves these two classical problems. This algorithm has been implemented on a hypercube iPSC/2 and results are given.

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