Parallel Rendering Technologies for High-Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters

Rendering is the process of converting an abstract description of a scene (a data set) to an image. For complex data sets or high-resolution images, the rendering process can be highly compute intensive, and applications with requirements for rapid turnaround time and human perception place additional demands on processing power. State-of-the-art graphics hardware can significantly enhance rendering performance, but a single piece of hardware is often limited by processor performance and available memory. If very high resolution is required, the rendering task can simply be too large for one piece of hardware to handle.

Exploiting multiple processing units — a technique known as parallel rendering — can provide the necessary computational power to accelerate these rendering tasks. This article discusses the major architectures and methodologies for parallel rendering with HPC workstation clusters and describes how open source utilities such as Chromium and Distributed Multihead X (DMX) can help meet large-scale rendering requirements.