Parallel Rendering

Meeting the growing demands for speed and quality in rendering computer graphics images requires new techniques. Practical parallel rendering provides one of the most practical solutions. This book addresses the basic issues of rendering within a parallel or distributed computing environment, and considers the strengths and weaknesses of multiprocessor machines and networked render farms for graphics rendering. Case studies of working applications demonstrate, in detail, practical ways of dealing with complex issues involved in parallel processing.

This comprehensive work merges two of the hottest topics in computer science: parallel computing and computer graphics. Selected Topics from the Table of Contents: -Overview of Accelerated Rendering Techniques -Overview of Parallel Methods for Image Generation -Issues in Parallel Algorithm Development -Overview of Base Level Implementation -Compari

"Real-Time Graphics Rendering Engine" reveals the software architecture of the modern real-time 3D graphics rendering engine and the relevant technologies based on the authors’ experience developing this high-performance, real-time system. The relevant knowledge about real-time graphics rendering such as the rendering pipeline, the visual appearance and shading and lighting models are also introduced. This book is intended to offer well-founded guidance for researchers and developers who are interested in building their own rendering engines. Hujun Bao is a professor at the State Key Lab of Computer Aided Design and Computer Graphics, Zhejiang University, China. Dr. Wei Hua is an associate professor at the same institute.

Abstract: "Volume rendering is a powerful, but computationally intensive, computer graphics technique for visualizing volumetric datasets. This paper presents results of investigations into techniques for volume rendering using parallel processing on a shared-memory, multiple- instruction, multiple-data (MIMD) architecture. In particular, two widely used algorithms for volume rendering, raycasting and projection, have been parallelized on a BBN TC2000, and their performance has been measured and analyzed. Preliminary results indicate that the raycasting approach to volume rendering has some advantages for parallelization on this type of architecture."

Geometric Modeling and Scientific Visualization are both established disciplines, each with their own series of workshops, conferences and journals. But clearly both disciplines overlap; this observation led to the idea of composing a book on Geometric Modeling for Scientific Visualization.

Abstract: "This paper presents a divide-and-conquer ray-traced volume rendering algorithm and a parallel image compositing method, along with their implementation and performance on the Connection Machine CM-5, and networked workstations. This algoritm distributes both the data and the computations to individual processing units to achieve fast, high- quality rendering of high-resolution data. The volume data, once distributed, is left intact. The processing nodes perform local raytracing of their subvolume concurrently. No communication between processing units is needed during this locally ray-tracing process. A subimage is generated by each processing unit and the final image is obtained by compositing subimages in the proper order, which can be determined a priori. Test results on both the CM-5 and a group of networked workstations demonstrate the practicality of our rendering algorithm and compositing method."