Interactive-Rate Animation Generation by Parallel Progressive Ray-Tracing on Distributed-Memory Machines

We describe a dynamic load-balancing algorithm for ray-tracing by progressive refinement on a distributed-memory parallel computer. Parallelization of progressive ray-tracing for single images is difficult because of the inherent sequential nature of the sample location generation process, which is optimized (and different) for any given image. Parallelization of progressive ray-tracing when generating image sequences at a fixed interactive rate is even more difficult, because of the time and synchronization constraints imposed on the system. The fixed frame rate requirement complicates matters and even renders meaningless traditional measures of parallel system performance (e.g., speedup). We show how to overcome these problems, which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been treated before. Exploiting the temporal coherence between frames enables us to both accelerate rendering and improve the load-balance throughout the sequence. Our dynamic load-balance algorithm combines local and global methods to account not only for rendering performance, but also for communication overhead and synchronization issues. The algorithm is shown to be robust to the harsh environment imposed by a time-critical application, such as the one we consider.