Exploiting coherence for multiprocessor ray tracing

The scalability and cost effectiveness of general-purpose distributed-memory multiprocessor systems makes them particularly suitable for ray-tracing applications. However, the limited memory available to each processor in such a system requires schemes to distribute the model database among the processors. The authors identify a form of coherence in the ray-tracing algorithm that can be exploited to develop optimum schemes for data distribution in a multiprocessor system. This in turn gives rise to high processor efficiency for systems with limited distributed memory.<>