ECE 498 Project 1

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ECE 498 Project 1

• Mathew Drouin
• Roger Blanchette
• Mitchell Wark

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Introduction

• Raytracing and POV-Ray
• Installation and Configuration on Bender
• Performance Metrics
• Conclusion

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Raytracing and POV-Ray

• Generate images based on a mathematical
  description of a scene
• Mimics how light would interact with the objects
  in the scene

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Raytracing and POV-Ray
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Raytracing and POV-Ray

• POV-Ray open source raytracing software

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Raytracing and POV-Ray

• Raytracing is inherently recursive
• A scene could require A LOT of calculations
• Each pixel of a scene is independent of
  neighboring pixels (embarrisingly parallel)
• MPI-POV-Ray is an open source patch allowing
  POV-Ray to operate with MPI

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Raytracing and POV-Ray

• POV-Ray supports Adaptive Anti-Aliasing
• Time consuming

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Installing and Configuring POV-Ray
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Parallel Performance Metrics

• How MPI-POV-Ray works

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Parallel Performance Metrics

• Benchmarks were run to render a 1024x768 image
  using non-recursive AA with a depth of 4

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Parallel Performance Metrics

• Odd Results
• Verified the execution times through many tests
• Appears that by splitting the image into smaller
  chunks causes faster execution (even with the 2
  node operation)

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Parallel Performance Metrics

• Possible Explanations
• Working with smaller chunks of data may allow
  greater use of the cache
• Differences between gcc and mpicc were explored

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Conclusion

• Installed and Configured MPI-POV-Ray on Bender
• Showed an extreme advantage to utilizing a
  supercomputer for image rendering

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Benchmark Image