Parallel Simulation of the Global Illumination

In this paper, a rendering system is presented, which utilizes efficient parallel methods for solving the global illumination problem. The system allows interactive walkthroughs in complex architectural environments consisting of several thousands of polygons and an off-line animation production. The image synthesis system is designed as a portable and scalable client-server architecture. The parallel global illumination calculations are performed by a rendering server, either on massively parallel computer systems or on heterogeneous workstation-clusters. The visualizationinterfaces are connected to the server as clients, which are started on workstations with specialized graphics hardware. Keywords: Parallel computing, image synthesis, radiosity, ray tracing, two pass method, global illumination 1 Introduction Computer graphics technology is quickly becoming part of everyday experience. One important aim of the research in the area of image synthesis in the last couple of years has..