Ray Tracing in a Distributed Environment
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Date
1994-04-01T00:00:00Z
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Abstract
The results of parallelizing a classical ray tracer in a typical LAN-connected workstation environment is presented. The motivation of this work is to utilize the idle workstation cycles at night. Issues involved in distributing the processing of a ray tracer are discussed and our solutions are presented. Performance tests are carried out on a group of homogeneous and heterogeneous workstations. Some unexpected problems were encountered and our approaches are described. Initial results showed that the achievable speedup is comparable to some of the parallel approaches on dedicated MIMD systems. All 80 instructional workstations in our department were utilized without causing significant degradation in speedup.