Parallel raytracing: a case study on partitioning and scheduling on workstation clusters

Author

Freisleben, Bernd ; Hartmann, Dieter ; Kielmann, Thilo

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Siegen Univ., Germany

Volume

1

fYear

1997

fDate

7-10 Jan 1997

Firstpage

596

Abstract

A case study is presented which is aimed at investigating the performance of several parallel versions of the POV-Ray ray-tracing package implemented on a workstation cluster using the MPI message-passing library. Based on a manager/worker scheme, variants of workload partitioning and message scheduling strategies, in conjunction with different task granularities, are evaluated with respect to their runtime behaviour. The results indicate that dynamic, adaptive strategies are required to cope with both the unbalanced workload characteristics of the parallel ray-tracing application and the different computational capabilities of the machines in a workstation cluster environment

Keywords

application program interfaces; message passing; parallel programming; processor scheduling; ray tracing; realistic images; rendering (computer graphics); resource allocation; software libraries; software packages; software performance evaluation; MPI message-passing library; Message Passing Interface; POV-Ray software package; case study; dynamic adaptive strategies; machine computational capabilities; manager/worker scheme; message scheduling strategies; parallel ray-tracing; runtime behaviour; software performance; task granularities; unbalanced workload characteristics; workload partitioning; workstation clusters; Cameras; Color; Computer aided software engineering; Concurrent computing; Image generation; Layout; Libraries; Packaging; Pixel; Processor scheduling; Ray tracing; Runtime; Workstations;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

System Sciences, 1997, Proceedings of the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on

Conference_Location

Wailea, HI

ISSN

1060-3425

Print_ISBN

0-8186-7743-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HICSS.1997.667407

Filename

667407