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Parallel ray tracing based upon a multilevel topological knowledge acquisition of the scene
Author(s) -
RIS Philippe,
ARQUÈS Didier
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8659.1330221
Subject(s) - computer science , ray tracing (physics) , topology (electrical circuits) , process (computing) , parallelism (grammar) , simple (philosophy) , deadlock , routing (electronic design automation) , tracing , distributed computing , parallel computing , theoretical computer science , computer network , mathematics , programming language , philosophy , physics , epistemology , combinatorics , quantum mechanics
Including the standard parallelization by grouping primary rays, this paper presents a new parallel ray‐timing method based upon a topological knowledge acquisition of the scene. This topological knowledge focuses on relative positions between objects and processes and uses a new type of message. Indeed, instead of exchanging database pages or rays, processes exchange topological information. This information is used by each process to decrease its own list of objects to test against rays The acquisition of information about relative positions between objects and processes is obtained by a careful ordering of he pixel calculation. The processes are dispatched on a computer network including a parallel computer The organization of the processes on this network is a multilevel one leading to different levels of topological message exchanges This method is characterized by topological messages describing the scene, dynamic optimization of the database, easy parallelization on any network (no deadlock, fault tolerance, easily expandable and simple routing), and gives interesting results with true or simulated parallelism.