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| GI'96 Online Papers |
Coherency (data locality) is one of the most important factors that influences the performance of distributed ray tracing systems, especially when object dataflow approach is employed. The enormous cost associated with remote fetches must be reduced to improve the effi- ciency of the parallel renderer. Objects once fetched should be maximally utilized before replacing them with other objects. In this paper, we describe a parallel vol- ume ray caster that eliminates thrashing by efficiently advancing a ray-front in a front-to-back manner. The method adopts an image-order approach, but capitalizes on the advantages of object-order algorithms as well to almost eliminate the communication overheads. Unlike previous algorithms, we have successfully preserved the thrashless property across a number of incrementally changing screen positions also. The use of efficient data structures and object ordering scheme has enabled com- plete latency hiding of non-local objects. The sum total of all these result in a scalable parallel volume renderer with the most coherent screen traversal. Comparison with other existing screen traversal schemes delineates the advantages of our approach.
@inproceedings{LawYagel-gi96,
title = "Multi-frame thrashless ray casting with advancing ray-front",
author = "Asish Law and Roni Yagel",
booktitle = "Graphics Interface",
year = "1996",
month = "May",
pages = "70--77"
}