Image Layer Decomposition for Distributed Real-Time Rendering on Clusters

We propose a novel work partitioning technique, Image Layer Decomposition (ILD), designed specifically to support distributed real-time rendering on commodity clusters. ILD has several advantages over previous partitioning algorithms for our targeted environment, including its compatibility with the use of hardware graphics accelerators, decoupling of communication bandwidth requirement from scene complexity, and reduced communication bandwidth growth as the system size increases. Furthermore, ILD tries to optimize the rendering of a sequence of frames (of an interactive application) instead of only individual frames. We simulate ILD using traces taken from a VRML viewer. Our results show that ILD can be expected to work well up to moderately sized clusters and to outperform sort-last, a common partitioning approach, because of its smaller communication bandwidth requirement.