Scalable Photorealistic Rendering of Complex Scenes

Photorealistic rendering of complex scenes poses computational demands as great as those of any large scale scienti c or engineering calculation. Just as scienti c calculations have bene ted from access to scalable computing systems so too can photorealistic rendering. This paper describes an application of scalable parallel processors to photorealistic rendering of complex scenes by Monte Carlo path tracing. The application uses scalable implementation methods in order to achieve good performance on large numbers of computers and on models which require large amounts of data. The implementation is a message driven concurrent pipeline which employs a di usion algorithm for dynamic load balancing. The application can be extended to partition extremely large models across physically distributed memory as well as to perform out-of-core calculations.

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