Object-Space Parallel Polygon Rendering On Hypercube-Connected Multicomputers

Abstract

This paper presents algorithms developed for object-space parallelism for polygon rendering on hypercube-connected multicomputers. In object-space parallelism, each processor is given the responsibility to render a portion of the input polygons. Each processor shades and z-buffers the locally generated pixels. After this local rendering, the remaining pixels in each processor should be globally z-buffered. Efficient parallelization of this pixel merging operation is important. This is the only place where an overhead is incurred due to parallelization. In this paper, efficient algorithms are presented to perform local rendering and global pixel merging operations. A modified scanline based z-buffer algorithm is proposed. This algorithm reduces the number of pixels sent and received in the pixel merging operation and avoids the re-initialization of the z-buffer for each scanline. Various algorithms are proposed for pixel merging phase. These algorithms use different communication charac..