Practical Parallel Rendering
Alan Chalmers, Timothy Davis and Erik Reinhard
Practical Parallel Rendering
The ever increasing computational demands associated with rendering
has meant that parallel rendering is almost as old as rendering
itself. However, the full potential parallel processing has to offer
of producing wonderful images in reasonable times has always seemed to
allude those striving for this "holy grail".
While parallel processing on a low number of processors is relatively straightforward, the challenge comes when confronting an implementation on a large system. Here the overheads associated with the processors working together can rapidly dominate and lead to the frustration of a solution time of more than that which was achievable on a single processor. And yet it is precisely these larger systems which offer the computational performance we seek.
The aim of this book is to describe the problems associated with
parallel rendering, provide a methodology as to how these problems can
be minimized and demonstrate how, with care, it is indeed possible to
achieve efficient parallel rendering.
Publication Details
This book is published by AKPeters in July 2002 under ISBN 1-56881-179-9. It has 380 pages plus 8 pages of color. It is available online from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Review from Ray Tracing News
"Practical Parallel Rendering" edited by Chalmers et alia, is a must-have if you are working in the area of ray tracing on multiple CPUs. While it discusses other topics, such as graphics hardware and global illumination, a fair bit of the book, and all of the case studies, discuss methods of parallelizing ray tracing. It's got a lot of chewy information, collecting some of the best research in the field in the past few years into one place, and doing so in a coherent fashion. This book is based on the SIGGRAPH 2002 "Practical Parallel Rendering" course. It is a nicely-produced volume (despite some small squares sneaking into the final figures in some chapters), and a worthwhile guide to much of the current state of the art.
Table of Contents
Part I: Parallel Rendering | ||
| 1 | Introduction to Parallel Processing | Alan Chalmers |
| 2 | Task Scheduling and Data Management | Alan Chalmers |
| 3 | Parallel Global Illumination Algorithms | Erik Reinhard |
| 4 | Overview of Parallel Graphics Hardware | Kadi Bouatouch |
| 5 | Coherence in Ray Tracing | Timothy Davis and Erik Reinhard |
| ||
| 6 | Interactive Ray Tracing on a Super Computer | Steve Parker |
| 7 | Interactive Ray Tracing on PC's | Philipp Slusallek |
| 8 | The "Kilauea" Massively Parallel Ray Tracer | Toshi Kato et al. |
| 9 | Parallel Ray Tracing on a Chip | Tim Purcell |
| Bibliography | ||
| Index | ||
