Parallel Graphic Processing


"When will be able to generate in real-time an animated film such as 1998's A Bug's Life by Pixar? The short answer is decades. Generating an average frame of A Bug's Life takes three to four hours on a 330MHz Ultra SPARC, and requires about a gigabyte of geometric data alone, as 1998. To reach a minimum real-time rate of 12 frame per second, this means a speed-up of about 150,000 times is needed. Moore's Law give an acceleration rate of 10 times every 5 years; this puts real-time A Bug's Life at around the year 2024"
From the book "Real-Time Rendering" by T.Moeller and E.Haines.

But interactive ray-tracing of complex scenes is possible today. For example, a parallel system with 60 CPUs, can be render a scene with 35 million spheres at 15 frame per second.

Our experience about parallel graphic processing deals with two problems; the first is a classic parallel processing objective applied to graphic algorithms, that is speeding-up the process. In other words, speeding-up their computational performance.
The second problem, more particular, consider that in the case of graphic-numerical processing, whose output is represented by numerical results and drawings, the host computer cannot be a remote graphics workstation with increase in the cost of communication with the system.
So the research for efficient tchniques to make graphics calls by the parallel system assumes considerable importance. In this situation we need introduce a new metrics evaluation of the performances that keeps count of the graphic visualization phase. For more detail obout our studies and results in this area see the references.

As a remark, we underline that a distributed graphic processing, is simply able using the well know Xwindow System. In fact it allows us to write Client applications that run on different computers and using the TCP/IP and Xprotocol can directly draw on a display of a remote workstation that must have the X-Server software.

References