Performance analysis of a parallel multi-view rendering architecture using light fields

Abstract

Multiple view rendering is a common problem for applications where multiple users visualize a common dataset, as in multi-player games and collaborative engineering tools. For a system to be able to render a large number of views at interactive rates efficiently, parallel processing is an attractive technique. In this work, we present the implementation of a pipelined multiview light field renderer using a cluster with GPUs and MPI. We discuss the parallelization model and the problem of partitioning the tasks of the pipeline among the cluster machines based on the pipeline model and the costs of the stages. Our solution achieves 83% efficiency with ten machines, against only 11% efficiency of a naive parallelization.