Ray Tracing in Distributed Computing Environments Using PVM

• Main Author: 曾建維
• Other Authors: 王宗銘
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1994
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/44567382271971686699

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 資訊科學研究所 === 82 === 　　This thesis presents the development of Provim system, a ray tracing sys-tem accelerated by the bounding volume hierarchy developed in distributed computing environments consisting of a network of heterogeneous worksta-tions. The system has been designed to be independent on the network topology, and the the processor farm computational model is utilized to harness the computing. To facilitate the system development Parallel Virtual Ma-chine (PVM) is adopted where the network communications are proceeded by calling routines in the PVM library. 　　The Provim system supports the centralized and decentralized approaches with the difference in the way a task be generated and scheduled. In the centralized approach, the master is responsible for the task generation and scheduling. For the decentralized approach, the load of task generation and scheduling is distributed to available slaves reducing the potential bottleneck possibly encoutered in the master. The system load balancing is achieved by using the demand-driven task request strategy associated with appropriate task granularities. 　　The Provim system has been implemented using C programming lan-guage. The system has demonstrated that ray traced images that would have taken between several hours to generate on a single workstation can now be generated in between several minutes using 28 workstations. Results have also shown that the decentralized approach is faster than the centralized approach. 　　It is concluded that computing in distributed computing environments such as those based on network workstations is potential to bring significant benefits to computationally intensive applications offering advantages of low cost and ready availability. Furthermore, the PVM can facilitate the times and costs spent on developing parallel/distributed systems. 　　This is a ray traced image for the magic-star model consisting of 4132 objects. It can be rendered within 8.22 minutes by teh software developed in this thesis using a network of 28 heterigeneous workstations.