Spatial Partitioning for Parallel Hierarchical Radiosity on Distributed Memory Architectures

. This paper presents an ecient, highly scalable parallel implementation of the Hierarchical Radiosity Algorithm. We present a clever mapping of Hierarchical Radiosity to high-dimensional spaces that manifests a locality property, which can greatly reduce communication on parallel distributed memory architectures. We use a very simple dynamic spatial partitioning method to keep the mapping balanced. We describe solutions for some key implementation problems: grouping of elements and links, and data reference locality. Speedup plots give an impression of the scalability of our implementation. On a Cray T3E the speedup curve is almost linear up to 64 processors. This is better than previously published attempts on massively parallel distributed memory computers. 1 Introduction Many researchers have devised parallel algorithms for global illumination. Most of these are specically tailored to special assumptions about the physical properties of the scene's objects or to a single solutio..