A Perceptually-Driven Parallel Algorithm for Efficient Radiosity Simulation
Simon Gibson and Roger J. Hubbold.
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 6(3), July-September 2000.
Abstract
We describe a novel algorithm for computing view-independent
finite-element radiosity solutions on distributed shared-memory
parallel architectures. Our approach is based on the notion of a {\it
sub-iteration\/} being the transfer of energy from a single source to
a subset of the scene's receiver patches. By using an efficient
queue-based scheduling system to process these sub-iterations, we show
how radiosity solutions can be generated without the need for
processor synchronisation between iterations of the progressive
refinement algorithm. The only significant source of inter-processor
communication required by our method is for visibility
calculations. We also describe a perceptually-driven approach to
visibility estimation, which employs an efficient volumetric grid
structure, and attempts to reduce the amount of inter-processor
communication by approximating visibility queries between distant
patches. Our algorithm also eliminates the need for dynamic
load-balancing until the end of the solution process, and is shown to
achieve a super-linear speedup in many situations.