Distributed Ray Tracing in an Open Source Environment (Work in Progress)
Gunnar Johansson, Ola Nilsson, Andreas Söderström, Ken Museth · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2006
We present work in progress on concurrent ray tracing with distributed computers using ``off-the-shelf'' open source software. While there exists numerous open source ray tracers, very few offer support for state-of-the-art concurrent computing. However, it is a well known fact that ray tracing is computationally intensive and yet prevails as the preferred algorithm for photorealistic rendering. Thus, the current work is driven by a desire for a simple programming strategy (or recipe) that allows pre-existing ray tracing code to be parallelized on a heterogenous cluster of available office computers - strictly using open source components. Simplicity, stability, efficiency and modularity are the driving forces for this engineering project, and as such we do not claim any novel research contributions. However, we stress that this project grew out of a real-world need for a render cluster in our research group, and consequently our solutions have a significant practical value. In fact some of our results show a close to optimal speedup when considering the relative performances of each node. In this systems paper we aim at sharing these solutions and experiences with other members of the graphics community.