An improved binary-swap compositing for sort-last parallel rendering on distributed memory multiprocessors

摘要

Sort-last parallel rendering is a good rendering scheme on distributed memory multiprocessors. This paper presents an improvement on the binary-swap (BS) method, which is an efficient image compositing algorithm for sort-last parallel rendering. Our compositing method uses three acceleration techniques, compared to the original BS method: (1) the interleaved splitting, (2) multiple bounding rectangle, and (3) run-length encoding. Through the use of the three techniques, our method balances the compositing workload among processors, exploits more sparsity of the image, and reduces the cost of communication. We also show some experimental results on a PC cluster. The results show that our method completes the image compositing faster than the original BS method, and its speedup to the original increases with the number of processors.