A Hierarchical Radiosity Method with Scene Distribution

Nowadays, one of the most active areas of research in computer graphics is focussed on improving the performance of global illumination methods. In this paper we present a new parallel method for hierarchical radiosity computation. Contrary to usual solutions in the literature our approach carries out an effective partitioning and distribution of the input geometry among the processors. Thus, the memory constraint is reduced when processing large scenes. The method presented in this paper also introduces a multi-thread scheduling to improve interaction between processors. This solution replaces the polling strategy usually used in parallel computing, when several independent tasks need to establish asynchronous communication. The great flexibility of our parallel implementation has been demonstrated by the good results achieved on a testbed with different computing systems and test scenes.