A shared-memory implementation of the hierarchical radiosity method

AbstractThe radiosity method is a simulation method from computer graphics to visualize the global illumination in scenes containing diffuse objects within an enclosure. A variety of realizations (including parallel approaches) were proposed to achieve a high efficiency while guaranteeing the same accuracy of the graphical representation. The hierarchical radiosity method reduces the computational costs considerably but results in a highly irregular algorithm which makes a parallel implementation more difficult. We investigate a task-oriented shared memory implementation and present optimizations with different behavior concerning locality and granularity. To be able to concentrate on load balancing and scalability issues, we use a shared-memory machine with uniform memory access time, the SB-PRAM