Load balancing strategies for a parallel ray-tracing system based on constant subdivision

Static and dynamic load balancing strategies for a multiprocessor system for a ray tracing algorithm based on constant subdivision are presented. An object space is divided into regular cubes (subspaces), whose boundary planes are perpendicular to the coordinate axes, and these are allocated to the processors in the system. Here, load balancing among the processors is the most important problem. Firstly, in a category of static load balancing, strategies for mapping the subspaces into the processors are evaluated by simulation. Moreover, we propose a hierarchical multiprocessor system in order to realize dynamic load balancing with the static one. Its architecture can overcome the limitation of the static load balancing in a large scale multiprocessor system.