Visibility Masks for Solving Complex Radiosity Computations on Multiprocessors

Bruno Arnaldi (1) , Thierry Priol (2) , Luc Renambot (2) , Xavier Pueyo (3)

1 SIAMES - Computer generated images, animation, modeling and simulation
2 CAPS - Compilation, parallel architectures and system
3 UdG - Universitat de Girona

In this paper, we present a modified version of the virtual wall concept we introduced in a previously published paper. The goal of our work is to design a strategy to handle very complex scenes (more than 1 million of patches) for radiosity computation. Comparing to other radiosity algorithms, our solution focuses on the ability to compute the radiosity on local environments instead of solving the problem for the whole environment. By splitting the problem into subproblems, using Virtual Interface and Visibility Masks, our technique is able to achieve better data locality than other standard solutions. This property is capital when using either a modern sequential computer to reduce data movement in the memory hierarchy or a multiprocessors to keep as low as possible communication between processors whatever the communication paradigm is: either message passing or shared variable. In the paper, we present an implementation of visibility masks on a distributed memory parallel computer (Intel Paragon XP/S).

Mots clés: DATA LOCALITY; RADIOSITY; COMPLEX DATABASES; PARALLELISM

Domaines: Autre [cs.OH]

Bruno Arnaldi, Thierry Priol, Luc Renambot, Xavier Pueyo. Visibility Masks for Solving Complex Radiosity Computations on Multiprocessors. [Research Report] RR-3008, Inria. 1996. ⟨inria-00073686⟩