Parallel rendering

Parallel rendering is used to improve the performance of computer graphics. The rendering of graphics requires massive computational resources for complex objects like medical visualization, iso-surface generation, and some CAD applications. Traditional methods like ray tracing, 3D textures, etc., work extremely slowly in simple machines.

Parallel rendering divides the work to be done and processes it in parallel. For example, if we have a non-parallel ray-casting application, we would send rays one by one to all the pixels in the view frustum. Instead, we can divide the whole frustum into some x number of parts and then run that many threads or processes to send rays in parallel to those x tiles. We can use a cluster of machines to do such a thing and then composite the results. This is parallel rendering.

Parallel rendering can be used in graphics intensive applications to visualize the data more efficiently by adding resources like more machines.

There is an open source software package called Chromium (http://chromium.sourceforge.net) which provides a parallel rendering mechanism for existing applications.