A Portable Optimized Implementation of Ray Tracing for Performance Computing

This proposal describes the development and analysis of a prototype portable, optimized ray tracing application. We will take an existing ray tracer and modify it to take advantage of pipilined, vector, and massively parallel processing in a portable manner. We will then analyze the effects of these performance enhancements. The major purpose of this study is to determine when MPP architectures or clusters of low-cost workstations will be able to generate ray traced graphics in real time. Anticipated Benefits: A portable optimized ray tracer will generate high fidelity graphics in real time, a crucial function for virtual reality, simulators, and other graphics-intensive applications.