A Scalable Implementation of an Interactive Increasing Realism Ray-Tracing Algorithm

Ray-Tracing is a well known algorithm that simulates the reflection and refraction of light rays in the objects surfaces, beginning with rays sent from the view point. Each ray has to be tested against objects in the 3D scene and this is very time consuming. This paper describes one parallel solution. It is oriented to a general network, where each processor manages data and tasks and shares them with the others to optimise common resources utilisation. In this context, a Virtual Sharing Memory (VSM) is used and an efficient load balancing strategy can be implemented. With this approach, the amount of messages in the network tends to increase and strategies to reduce them are needed. Schemes to optimise remote accesses to data have been developed, namely a special type of multicast message addressing named InPathTo.

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