A Flexible Adaptation Service for Distributed Rendering

Abstract

Even though high-performance real-time rendering showed significant improvements through implementing its algorithms on top of many-core technologies, achieving interactivity in large scenes still requires a networked cluster for distributing the workload. Available frameworks assume a high-bandwidth networking between nodes of a cluster and ignore remote rendering scenarios where adaptation to limited resources (e.g., low bandwidth) is required. In this paper, we present an extension to the flexible URay framework for distributed rendering that allows to react to unfavorable and changing network conditions.We show how adaptation strategies are applied to streams of rendered images, and how to realize application scenarios that are even able to use the Internet as a communication network, which suffers from unpredictable conditions in terms of latency and bandwidth.