Progressive refinement radiosity on ring-connected multicomputers

The progressive refinement method is investigated for parallelization on ring-connected multicomputers. A synchronous scheme, based on static task assignment, is proposed, in order to achieve better coherence during the parallel light distribution computations. An efficient global circulation scheme is proposed for the parallel light distribution computations, which reduces the total volume of concurrent communication by an asymptotical factor. The proposed parallel algorithm is implemented on a ring-embedded Intel's iPSC/2 hypercube multicomputer. Load balance quality of the proposed static assignment schemes are evaluated experimentally. The effect of coherence in the parallel light distribution computations on the shooting patch selection sequence is also investigated.