Raster Display of a Rotating Object Using Parallel Processing
Thomas Strothotte, Brian Funt · Computer Graphics Forum · 1983
Abstract Parallel processing algorithms have been developed which approach real‐time in displaying raster graphics images of a single rotating three‐dimensional object. The hardware required consists of a large number of individual processors with inter‐processor communication restricted to immediate neighbours. The overall structure is as if the processors were spread uniformly over the surface of a sphere. The objects for display are modelled as if they were inside this sphere of processors. Each processor stores the following information: the intersection points of the object's surface with a radial line extended from the sphere's centre along with the surface normals at those intersection points, and pixels representing a small section of the screen. The algorithm involves an organised message‐passing scheme to accomplish rotations of the object description and the subsequent display of the image. A simulation of a system involving several hundred processors indicates that its performance improves as a near‐linear function of the number of processors.