DPBP: a sort-first parallel rendering algorithm for distributed rendering environments

In some visualization systems, the data and computational resources are distributed globally and users need to interact with these resources easily and efficiently. Real-time rendering for massive datasets is a computation intensive task. one solution is to distributes the rendering tasks over a set of computation units to achieve high rendering performance. This paper presents a recursive sort-first partitioning algorithm named Dynamic Pixel Bucket Partition (DPBP) for parallel rendering alone with their implementation and performance in a distributed rendering environment. This algorithm distributes rendering work loads evenly to individual rendering units to achieve fast, high quality rendering of massive data. Test results in a multi-cluster environment demonstrate the practicality of this rendering algorithm.