NPAC Technical Report SCCS-693
Dynamic Load Balancing for Raytraced Volume Rendering on Distributed Memory Machines
Sanjay Goil, Sanjay Ranka
Submitted February 01 1995
Abstract
We present a technique for adaptive load balancing for ray traced volume
rendering on distributed memory machines using hierarchical representation of volume data.
Our approach partitions the image onto processors while preserving scanline coherence.
Volume data is assumed replicated on each processor since our focus in this
paper is to characterize computation and communication requirements for performing
dynamic load balancing. We show that communication overheads are negligible to perform
dynamic load balancing while rendering a sequence of frames on a distributed memory
implementation. By exploiting image and frame coherence while distributing the image space,
load balancing can be achieved at a relatively low cost.