SCALABLE MONTE-CARLO IMAGE SYNTHESIS

This paper describes a scalable photorealistic renderer that is design ed to render scenes of arbitrary complexity on computer systems of arb itrary size. The rendering algorithm is a Monte Carlo method to comput e approximate solutions of the rendering equation. The software implem entation uses a diffusive load balancing method coupled with a message driven concurrent pipeline. Measured performance in rendering replica ted models on up to 128 computers shows scaling efficiencies as high a s 99%. Simple extensions will partition extremely large models across physically distributed memory as well as perform out-of-core calculati ons.