TY - JOUR
T1 - Image composition schemes for sort-last polygon rendering on 2d mesh multicomputers
AU - Lee, Tong Yee
AU - Raghavendra, C. S.
AU - Nicholas, John B.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was performed in part using the Intel Touchstone Delta System operated by California Institute of Technology on behalf of the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium. Access to this facility was provided by Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL), a multiprogram laboratory operated for the US. Department of Energy by Battelle Memorial Institute under Contract DE-AC06-76RLO 1830. We would also like to give our special thanks to anonymous reviewers for useful comments on our composition scheme. This research is supported by the Boeing Centennial Chair Professor funds.
PY - 1996
Y1 - 1996
N2 - In a sort-last polygon rendering system, the efficiency of image composition Is very important for achieving fast rendering, in this paper, the implementation of a sort-last rendering system on a general purpose multicomputer system is described. A two-phase sort-last-full image composition scheme is described first, and then many variants of it are presented for 2D mesh message-passing multiComputers, such as the Intel Delta and Paragon. All the proposed schemes are analyzed and experimentally evaluated on Caltech's Intel Delta machine for our sort-last parallel polygon Tenderer. Experimental results show that sort-last-sparse strategies are better suited than sort-last-full schemes for software implementation on a general purpose multicomputer system. Further, interleaved composition regions perform better than coherent regions. In a large multicomputer system, performance can be improved by carefully scheduling the tasks of rendering and communication. Using 512 processors to render our test scenes, the peak rendering rate achieved on a 262,144 triangle dataset is close to 4.6 million triangles per second which is comparable to the speed of current state-of-the-art graphics workstations.
AB - In a sort-last polygon rendering system, the efficiency of image composition Is very important for achieving fast rendering, in this paper, the implementation of a sort-last rendering system on a general purpose multicomputer system is described. A two-phase sort-last-full image composition scheme is described first, and then many variants of it are presented for 2D mesh message-passing multiComputers, such as the Intel Delta and Paragon. All the proposed schemes are analyzed and experimentally evaluated on Caltech's Intel Delta machine for our sort-last parallel polygon Tenderer. Experimental results show that sort-last-sparse strategies are better suited than sort-last-full schemes for software implementation on a general purpose multicomputer system. Further, interleaved composition regions perform better than coherent regions. In a large multicomputer system, performance can be improved by carefully scheduling the tasks of rendering and communication. Using 512 processors to render our test scenes, the peak rendering rate achieved on a 262,144 triangle dataset is close to 4.6 million triangles per second which is comparable to the speed of current state-of-the-art graphics workstations.
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U2 - 10.1109/2945.537304
DO - 10.1109/2945.537304
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0030246709
SN - 1077-2626
VL - 2
SP - 202
EP - 217
JO - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
JF - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
IS - 3
ER -