Title: Progressive radiosity method on clusters using a new clipping algorithm

Authors: M. Amor, J.R. Sanjurjo, E.J. Padron, R. Doallo

Addresses: Department Electronics and Systems, University of Coruna, Campus de Elvina, s/n, 15071 – A Coruna, Spain. ' Department Electronics and Systems, University of Coruna, Campus de Elvina, s/n, 15071 – A Coruna, Spain. ' Department Electronics and Systems, University of Coruna, Campus de Elvina, s/n, 15071 – A Coruna, Spain. ' Department Electronics and Systems, University of Coruna, Campus de Elvina, s/n, 15071 – A Coruna, Spain

Abstract: Global illumination simulation is highly critical for realistic image synthesis; without it, the rendered images look flat and synthetic. The main problem is that the simulation for large scenes is a high time-consuming process. In this paper, we present a uniform partitioning method in order to split the scene domain into a set of disjoint subspaces which are distributed among the processors of a distributed memory system. Since polygons partially inside several subspaces have to be clipped, we have developed a new clipping algorithm to manage this situation. Memory and communication requirements have been minimised in the parallel implementation. Finally, in order to evaluate the proposed method, we have used a progressive radiosity algorithm, running on two different PC clusters with modern processors and network technologies as a testbed. Good results in terms of speedup have been obtained.

Keywords: computer graphics; global illumination method; progressive radiosity; cluster computing; scene partitioning; clipping algorithm; simulation; image synthesis; distributed memory; parallel programming; high performance computing; high performance networking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2004.007565

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2004 Vol.1 No.1/2/3, pp.55 - 63

Published online: 05 Aug 2005 *

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