Light, The Universe and Parallel Radiosity

Radiosity provides an effective method for modelling a diffuse environment. Unfortunately this method is computationally expensive. The main cost of the radiosity method is the calculation of form factors which takes approximately 95% of the computation time. Through the use of a task farm the computation of form factors can be parallelised, on a Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) super computer like the CRAY-T3D. This creates a relatively good linear speed up. A different approach is to use a Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) model. Threads, instead of processes, are used to perform the work using a task farm. Apart from the thread's stack space all memory is global. Communication and synchronisation takes place using semaphores and conditions instead of message passing. This model reduces the amount of communication and synchronisation required between the master and the slaves. The size of the environment is limited only by the total amount of virtual memory available to the process...