Parallel polygon rendering for message-passing architectures

Applications such as real-time animation and scientific visualization demand high performance for rendering complex 3D abstract data models into 2D images. As large applications migrate to highly parallel supercomputers, how can we exploit the available parallelism to keep the rendering on the supercomputer? To answer this question, we developed a parallel polygon renderer for general-purpose MIMD distributed-memory message-passing systems. It exploits object-level and image-level parallelism, and can run on systems containing from one processor to a number bounded by the number of scan lines in the resulting image. Unlike earlier approaches, ours multiplexes the transformation and rasterization phases on the same machine. This reduces memory usage and network contention, and overlaps computation and communication.<>