An efficient library for parallel ray tracing and animation

Abstract

A parallel ray tracing library is presented for rendering high detail images of three dimensional geometry and computational fields. The library has been developed for use on distributed memory and shared memory parallel computers and can also run on sequential computers. Parallelism is achieved through the use of message passing and threads. It is shown that the library achieves almost linear scalability when run on large distributed memory parallel computers as well as large shared memory parallel computers. Several applications of parallel rendering are explored including rendering of CAD models, animation, magnetic resonance imaging, and visualization of volumetric flow fields. Ray tracing offers many advantages over polygon rendering techniques, in its innate parallelism, and quality of output.