A Parallel Rendering Algorithm for MIMD Architectures

Download or read book A Parallel Rendering Algorithm for MIMD Architectures written by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applications such as animation and scientific visualization demand high performance rendering of complex three dimensional scenes. To deliver the necessary rendering rates, highly parallel hardware architectures are required. The challenge is then to design algorithms and software which effectively use the hardware parallelism. A rendering algorithm targeted to distributed memory MIMD architectures is described. For maximum performance, the algorithm exploits both object-level and pixel-level parallelism. The behavior of the algorithm is examined both analytically and experimentally. Its performance for large numbers of processors is found to be limited primarily by communication overheads. An experimental implementation for the Intel iPSC/860 shows increasing performance from 1 to 128 processors across a wide range of scene complexities. It is shown that minimal modifications to the algorithm will adapt it for use on shared memory architectures as well. Crockett, Thomas W. and Orloff, Tobias Unspecified Center NAS1-18605; RTOP 505-90-52-01...