An efficient library for parallel ray tracing and animation

Many simulations that are run on parallel computers can beneet from the use of parallel graphics libraries that can do in-place rendering. This paper describes a parallel rendering library that is being developed on the Intel iPSC/860, Paragon, and on other machines supported by the Message Passing Interface (MPI). The rendering library can be used stan-dalone with a simple scene parser that is supplied , or as a rendering subprocess within a larger parallel computation. At the present time, the library supports a variety of mod-eling primitives including cylinders, patches, polygons, quadrics, spheres, and volumetric data sets. Features that set the ray tracing library apart from polygon based renderers are mirror reeection, refraction, shadows, texture mapping, and volume rendering. Current efforts are focused on improving volume rendering , overall performance, and ease-of-use.

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