Abstract
Distributed systems, especially clusters, can be used to execute ray tracing tasks in parallel for speeding up the image computation. Because ray tracing is a computational expensive and memory consuming task, ray tracing can also be used to benchmark clusters. This paper introduces task-distributor, a free software solution for the parallel execution of ray tracing tasks in distributed systems. The ray tracing solution used for this work is the Persistence Of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray). Task-distributor does not require any modification of the POV-Ray source code or the installation of an additional message passing library like the Message Passing Interface or Parallel Virtual Machine to allow parallel image computation, in contrast to various other projects. By analyzing the runtime of the sequential and parallel program parts of task-distributor, it becomes clear how the problem size and available hardware resources influence the scaling of the parallel application.
Highlights
This paper presents the software task-distributor,1 which implements the master–worker scheme to simplify the parallel execution of computation of images by using the ray tracing software Persistence Of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray) (Plachetka 1998) in parallel on multiple nodes of a distributed system like a cluster
Design decisions Task-distributor splits the image calculation by row, which does not require a modification of the POV-Ray source code and no additional library for message passing like Message Passing Interface (MPI) or Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is used
Conclusions and future work The parallel image computation by using POV-Ray in clusters can be simplified with the task-distributor software solution
Summary
This paper presents the software task-distributor, which implements the master–worker scheme to simplify the parallel execution of computation of images by using the ray tracing software POV-Ray (Plachetka 1998) in parallel on multiple nodes of a distributed system like a cluster. Plachetka (2002) presented a parallel version of POV-Ray version 3.1, which uses PVM In his work he described the speedup by using up to 48 worker nodes from a cluster with two processors per node. R. Rooney, the task-distributor solution uses the raster graphics file format Portable Network Graphics (PNG), which reduces the image size and the load on the master node and the local Ethernet. This scene was used for analyzing the performance and scalability of a cluster system with task-distributor and POV-Ray (see “Analysis of performance and scalability” section). 10 In a homogeneous cluster, all nodes consist of the same hardware components and run the same operating system
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