Hybrid image-/data-parallel rendering using island parallelism

Abstract

In parallel ray tracing, techniques fall into one of two camps: image-parallel techniques aim at increasing frame rate by replicating scene data across nodes and splitting the rendering work across different ranks, and data-parallel techniques aim at increasing the size of the model that can be rendered by splitting the model across multiple ranks, but typically cannot scale much in frame rate. We propose and evaluate a hybrid approach that combines the advantages of both by splitting a set of N x M ranks into M islands of N ranks each and using data-parallel rendering within each island and image parallelism across islands. We discuss the integration of this concept into four wildly different parallel renderers and evaluate the efficacy of this approach based on multiple different data sets.