A highly flexible multiprocessor solution for ray tracing

The ray tracing algorithm continues to attract much research and development to improve the quality of the images that are generated, and to reduce the time taken to produce them. By identifying the key requirements of a development system from the user's point of view, we describe a general-purpose multiprocessor solution for ray tracing which may be used to reduce execution time without restricting development of the ray tracing code. The solution is based upon a distributed memory multiprocessor system in which each processor addresses a small amount of memory relative to the size of the model database. Methods for exploiting the coherence of references to entries in the database are described which use a combination of dynamic and static caching techniques. This scheme allows databases of arbitrary size to be supported on multiprocessors with limited distributed memory.

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