Summary: Parallel Rendering with an Actor Model
Alan Heirich ? & James Arvo
Department of Computer Science
California Institute of Technology, 256­80
Pasadena, CA 91125
Abstract
This paper describes an application of autonomous concurrent objects (Ac­
tors) to parallel rendering. The resulting rendering system is shown to be both
scalable and portable. A parallel rendering application based on Monte Carlo
path tracing is constructed using programming abstractions defined by the Ac­
tor model. This application is demonstrated to scale to hundreds of computers
with efficiencies approaching 99%. The abstractions and the application are
demonstrated to be portable across a range of parallel and distributed com­
puter systems with various communications characteristics and topologies. A
similar set of abstractions have been implemented in VLSI, suggesting that
the entire rendering application could be realized by a special purpose systolic
architecture.
1 Introduction
Photorealistic rendering requires a physically accurate simulation of light trans­
port in complex geometric domains. Such domains may contain a diversity of

Source: Arvo, Jim - Departments of Information and Computer Science & Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Irvine

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences