PVM-Distributed Implementation of the Radiance Code

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed implementation of the Radiance rendering code using PVM, achieving significant speedups and efficient load balancing for image rendering and animation sequences on networked workstations.

Contribution

It introduces a PVM-based distributed version of Radiance that maintains rendering accuracy and enhances performance through novel static and dynamic partitioning techniques.

Findings

Speedups larger than 7.5 on 8 workstations

Exact primary ray replication in parallel implementation

Superlinear speedups for animation sequences

Abstract

The Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) tool has been used for a distributed implementation of Greg Ward's Radiance code. In order to generate exactly the same primary rays with both the sequential and the parallel codes, the quincunx sampling technique used in Radiance for the reduction of the number of primary rays by interpolation, must be left untouched in the parallel implementation. The octree of local ambient values used in Radiance for the indirect illumination has been shared among all the processors. Both static and dynamic image partitioning techniques which replicate the octree of the complete scene in all the processors and have load-balancing, have been developed for one frame rendering. Speedups larger than 7.5 have been achieved in a network of 8 workstations. For animation sequences, a new dynamic partitioning distribution technique with superlinear speedups has also been developed.