Authors:
Bob Somers
and
Zoë J. Wood
Affiliation:
California Polytechnic University, United States
Keyword(s):
Rendering, Distributed Rendering, Cluster Computing.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
High-Performance Computing and Parallel Rendering
;
Rendering
;
Systems and Software Architectures for Rendering
Abstract:
As the quest for more realistic computer graphics marches steadily on, the demand for rich and detailed imagery is greater than ever. However, the current "sweet spot" in terms of price, power consumption, and performance is in commodity hardware. If we desire to render scenes with tens or hundreds of millions of polygons as cheaply as possible, we need a way of doing so that maximizes the use of the commodity hardware that we already have at our disposal. We propose a distributed rendering architecture based on message-passing that is designed to partition scene geometry across a cluster of commodity machines, allowing the entire scene to remain in-core and enabling parallel construction of hierarchical spatial acceleration structures. The design uses feed-forward, asynchronous messages to allow distributed traversal of acceleration structures and evaluation of shaders without maintaining any suspended shader execution state. We also provide a simple method for throttling work gener
ation to keep message queueing overhead small. The results of our implementation show roughly an order of magnitude speedup in rendering time compared to image plane decomposition, while keeping memory overhead for message queuing around 1%.
(More)