Image-parallel Ray Tracing using OpenGL Interception

Abstract

CPU Ray tracing in scientific visualization has been shown to be an efficient rendering algorithm for large-scale polygonal data on distributed-memory systems by using custom integrations which modify the source code of existing visualization tools or by using OpenGL interception to run without source code modification to existing tools. Previous implementations in common visualization tools use existing data-parallel work distribution with sort-last compositing algorithms and exhibited sub-optimal performance scaling across multiple nodes due to the inefficiencies of data-parallel distributions of the scene geometry. This paper presents a solution which uses efficient ray tracing through OpenGL interception using an image-parallel work distribution implemented on top of the data-parallel distribution of the host program while supporting a paging system for access to non-resident data. Through a series of scaling studies, we show that using an image-parallel distribution often provides superior scaling performance which is more independent of the data distribution and view, while also supporting secondary rays for advanced rendering effects.