Parallelizing Visibility Computations on Triangulated Terrains

In this paper we address the problem of computing visibility information on digital terrain models in parallel. We propose a parallel algorithm for computing the visible region of an observation point located on the terrain. The algorithm is based on a sequential triangle-sorting visibility approach proposed in [De Floriani et al. 1989]. Static and dynamic parallelization strategies, both in terms of partitioning criteria and scheduling policies, are discussed. The different parallelization strategies are implemented on an MIMD multicomputer and evaluated through experimental results