Parallel rendering of fractal surfaces

Journal Article · Mon Feb 01 04:00:00 EST 1988 · Int. J. Parallel Program.; (United States)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01379322· OSTI ID:6164170

Stepoway, S L; Christiansen, M

Fractal surfaces are a useful modeling technique for terrain in computer graphics. Although an algorithm exists for ray tracing (Mandelbrot) fractal surfaces, the technique is computationally very expensive. The large degree of parallelism inherent in the problem suggests the use of parallel architectures for generating these images. They describe a parallel rendering algorithm for shared memory MIMD machines which takes advantage of image coherence to reduce computation. This algorithm has, on a Sequent Balance 21,000 with 20 processors, demonstrated a near-linear speedup. They examine the possible synchronization bottlenecks by statically assigning different numbers of CPUs to sections of the screen.

• Research Organization: Southern Methodist Univ., Dallas, TX (USA)
• OSTI ID: 6164170
• Journal Information: Int. J. Parallel Program.; (United States), Journal Name: Int. J. Parallel Program.; (United States) Vol. 17:1; ISSN IJPPE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990210* -- Supercomputers-- (1987-1989)
ALGORITHMS
ARRAY PROCESSORS
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
COMPUTER GRAPHICS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
DATA PROCESSING
FRACTALS
IMAGE PROCESSING
MAPPING
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PROCESSING
PROGRAMMING
RESOLUTION
SIMULATION
STATISTICAL MODELS
STOCHASTIC PROCESSES
SURFACES
SYNCHRONIZATION
TASK SCHEDULING
TIMING PROPERTIES
TOPOLOGICAL MAPPING
TRANSFORMATIONS