A side-effect-free hierarchical radiosity algorithm

The implementation of irregular algorithms with dynamic access patterns often requires the use of complex data structures and makes essential use of side effects. An example is the hierarchical radiosity method, a global illumination method from computer graphics, which uses dynamically growing trees with mutual interactions. The irregularity of the algorithm does not hinder a parallel realization on machines with a global address space, but the use of side effects requires a locking mechanism in order to avoid race conditions. This may cause sequentializations that reduce the obtainable speedup. Functional languages offer the possibility of programming without side effects, and they allow parallelization to be expressed orthoganally from the main program. In this paper we use Haskell, a standard nonstrict pure functional language, to realize the coordination level of the hierarchical radiosity algorithm without side effects. The program is executable sequentially using standard compilers, and it offers a variety of straightforward parallelization strategies without explicit locking that can be implemented with no change to the structure of the program.

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