GPU Cost Estimation for Load Balancing in Parallel Ray Tracing

Biagio Cosenza, Carsten Dachsbacher, Ugo Erra

2013

Abstract

Interactive ray tracing has seen enormous progress in recent years. However, advanced rendering techniques requiring many million rays per second are still not feasible at interactive speed, and are only possible by means of highly parallel ray tracing. When using compute clusters, good load balancing is crucial in order to fully exploit the available computational power, and to not suffer from the overhead involved by synchronization barriers. In this paper, we present a novel GPU method to compute a cost map: a per-pixel cost estimate of the ray tracing rendering process. We show that the cost map is a powerful tool to improve load balancing in parallel ray tracing, and it can be used for adaptive task partitioning and enhanced dynamic load balancing. Its effectiveness has been proven in a parallel ray tracer implementation tailored for a cluster of workstations.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Cosenza B., Dachsbacher C. and Erra U. (2013). GPU Cost Estimation for Load Balancing in Parallel Ray Tracing . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications and International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2013) ISBN 978-989-8565-46-4, pages 139-151. DOI: 10.5220/0004283401390151

in Bibtex Style

@conference{grapp13,
author={Biagio Cosenza and Carsten Dachsbacher and Ugo Erra},
title={GPU Cost Estimation for Load Balancing in Parallel Ray Tracing},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications and International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2013)},
year={2013},
pages={139-151},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004283401390151},
isbn={978-989-8565-46-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications and International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2013)
TI - GPU Cost Estimation for Load Balancing in Parallel Ray Tracing
SN - 978-989-8565-46-4
AU - Cosenza B.
AU - Dachsbacher C.
AU - Erra U.
PY - 2013
SP - 139
EP - 151
DO - 10.5220/0004283401390151