Dynamic adaptive surface rendering within a distributed memory multiprocessor

Abstract

We describe a software-based approach to computing surface renderings from three-dimensional volume primitives using a general purpose distributed memory multiple-instruction, multiple-data multiprocessor architecture. The system reduces total elapsed image rendering time by exploiting distributed computing and using dynamic algorithm selection to reduce individual processor rendering time. We briefly describe the system pipeline architecture, the operation of the pipeline, and the computational bottleneck our research addresses. We then describe two adaptively terminating surface rendering algorithms. Our new approach to reducing surface rendering time uses the two algorithms and a procedure for predicting individual processor workload from the image-rendering parameters. The technique we describe locally and dynamically selects the optimum surface-rendering algorithm at each processor in the multiprocessor machine, thereby substantially reducing the total elapsed image-rendering time.