Parallel adaptive ray-tracing

We describe a dynamic task allocation algorithm for ray-tracing by adaptive progressive refinement on a parallel computer. Parallelization of adaptive ray-tracing is difficult because of the inherent sequential nature of the sample location generation process, which is optimized (and different) for any given scene. We report on experimental results obtained from our implementation of this algorithm on a Meiko parallel computer. The three performance measures of the algorithm, namely, load-balance, speedup, and image quality, are shown to be good