A. Heirich et J. Arvo, A COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS OF LOAD BALANCING STRATEGIES FOR PARALLEL RAY-TRACING, Journal of supercomputing, 12(1-2), 1998, pp. 57-68
Citations number
18
Categorie Soggetti
Computer Science Hardware & Architecture","Computer Science Theory & Methods","Engineering, Eletrical & Electronic","Computer Science Hardware & Architecture","Computer Science Theory & Methods
This paper examines the effectiveness of load balancing strategies for
ray tracing on large parallel computer systems and cluster computers.
Popular static load balancing strategies are shown to be inadequate f
or rendering complex images with contemporary ray tracing algorithms,
and for rendering NTSC resolution images on 128 or more computers. Str
ategies based on image tiling are shown to be ineffective except on ve
ry small numbers of computers. A dynamic load balancing strategy, base
d on a diffusion model, is applied to a parallel Monte Carlo rendering
system. The diffusive strategy is shown to remedy the defects of the
static strategies. A hybrid strategy that combines static and dynamic
approaches produces nearly optimal performance on a variety of images
and computer systems. The theoretical results should be relevant to ot
her rendering and image processing applications.