A fully distributed parallel ray tracing scheme on the Delta Touchstone machine

Abstract

The authors describe a fully distributed, parallel algorithm for ray-tracing problem. Load balancing is achieved through the use of comb distribution to roughly assign the same amount of pixels to each processor first, and then dynamically redistribute excessive loads among processors to keep each processor busy. In this model, there is no need for a master node to be responsible for dynamic scheduling. When each node finishes its job, it just requests an extra job from one of its neighbors. The authors implement their algorithm on Intel Delta Touchstone machine with 2-D mesh network topology and provide simulation results. With their scheme, they can get good speedup and high efficiency without much communication overhead.<>