Hybrid Scheduling for Realistic Image Synthesis  Erik Reinhard, Alan Chalmers and Frederik Jansen

Erik Reinhard, Alan Chalmers and Frederik W. Jansen, "Hybrid Scheduling for Realistic Image Synthesis", in E. H. D'Hollander, G. R. Joubert, F. J. Peters and H. J. Sips, eds., "Parallel Computing, Fundamentals and Applications (Proceedings of the International Conference ParCo99)", Imperial College Press, pp 217--224, 1999.

Rendering a single high quality image may take several hours, or even days. The com-plexity of both the model and the lighting simulation may require excessive computer re-sources. In order to reduce the total rendering time and to accommodate large and complex models that exceed the size of a single processor system, a parallel renderer may provide a viable alternative to sequential computing. In this paper, a data-parallel strategy is applied to allow large models to be distributed over the processors' memories. The resulting uneven workload is then balanced by schedul-ing demand driven tasks on the same set of processors. Tasks are scheduled in either demand driven or data parallel fashion, according to ray coherence. Implications of this hybrid algo-rithm with respect to performance, caching and memory usage are investigated.

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