Task parallelism for ray tracing on a GPU cluster

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Thesis Type: Postgraduate

Institution Of The Thesis: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Computer Engineering, Turkey

Approval Date: 2008

Student: ÇAĞLAR ÜNLÜ

Supervisor: CEVAT ŞENER

Abstract:

Ray tracing is a computationally complex global illumination algorithm that is used for producing realistic images. In addition to parallel implementations on commodity PC clusters, recently, Graphics Processing Units (GPU) have also been used to accelerate ray tracing. In this thesis, ray tracing is accelerated on a GPU cluster where the viewing plane is divided into unit tiles. Slave processes work on these tiles in a task parallel manner which are dynamically assigned to them. To decrease the number of ray-triangle intersection tests, Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVH) are used. It is shown that almost linear speedup can be achieved. On the other hand, it is observed that API and network overheads are obstacles for scalability.