Abstract

. The work presents an MPI parallel implementation of Pov-Ray, a powerful public domain ray tracing engine. The major problem in ray tracing is the large amount of CPU time needed for the elaboration of the image. With this parallel version it is possible to reduce the computation time or to render, with the same elaboration time, more complex or detailed images. The program was tested successfully on ParMa2, a low-cost cluster of personal computers running Linux operating system. The results are compared with those obtained with a commercial multiprocessor machine, a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 parallel processing system based on an Origin CC-NUMA architecture. 1 Introduction The purpose of this work is the implementation of a distributed version of the original code of Pov-Ray [1], that is a well known public domain program for ray tracing. The parallelization of this algorithm involves many problems that are typical of the parallel computation. The ray tracing process is very c...

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