Next: Introduction
An Efficient Library for Parallel Ray Tracing and Animation
John Stone
Department of Computer Science
University of Missouri-Rolla
E-Mail: johns@cs.umr.edu
Abstract:
Many simulations that are run on parallel computers can benefit from
the use of parallel graphics libraries that can do in-place rendering.
This paper describes a parallel rendering library that is being developed
on the Intel iPSC/860, Paragon, and on other machines supported by the
Message Passing Interface (MPI).
The rendering library can be used standalone with a simple scene parser that is
supplied, or as a rendering subprocess within a larger parallel computation.
At the present time, the library supports a variety of modeling primitives
including cylinders, patches, polygons, quadrics, spheres,
and volumetric data sets. Features that set the ray tracing library
apart from polygon based renderers are mirror reflection, refraction,
shadows, texture mapping, and volume rendering.
Current efforts are focused on improving volume rendering, overall performance,
and ease-of-use.
John Stone
Thu Jun 1 16:08:53 CDT 1995