A Dedicated Graphics Processor SIGHT-2

Abstract

SIGHT-2 is a multiprocessor system that is intended to efficiently execute the ray tracing algorithm. To achieve high efficiency, three kinds of parallel execution mechanisms; (i) a multiprocessor configuration, (ii) a parallel execution of three dimensional vector operations, and (iii) functionally distributed parallel processing are introduced. Owing to the latter two techniques, each processing element (PE) has the ability to execute the standard ray tracing algorithm 10 times faster than a VAX11/780 with a floating point accelerator. In the present configuration, SIGHT-2 utilizes 16 PEs, which results in a peak power of 66.72 MFLOPS / 133.28 MIPS. During ray tracing, the efficiency of each PE is over 99% under static load balancing. In this paper, SIGHT-2 system architecture, its PE configuration, and VLSIs design are discussed. The system performance is also discussed.