Distributed Rendering of Particle Systems

Scalable Rendering allows the creation of high performance rendering systems without spe-cialist hardware by utilising clusters of rendering nodes with commercial graphics accelera-tors. Particle systems describe a class of rendering techniques for displaying objects without a rigid structure, including fire, water, and atmospheric effects, which traditional Computer Graphics approaches find difficult. The term has also been extended to cover decentralised behavioural systems consisting of large numbers of entities which are independent but influ-ence one another’s motion. Here we describe attempts to extend and improve on some existing computer graphics techniques by making use of parallel computation and rendering, to manage and display complex particle based systems in real-time on modest sized compute clusters. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Michael Manzke for his support and advice on this project, and Dr. Carol O’Sullivan whose help has also been invaluable to me, the Compute