Ray tracing on a networked processor array

Abstract

As computation costs increase to meet design requirements for computation-intensive graphics applications on today's embedded systems, the pressure to develop high-performance parallel processors on a chip will increase. Acceleration of the ray tracing computation has become a major issue as the computer graphics industry demands for rendering realistic images. Network-on-chip (NoC) techniques that interconnect multiple processing elements with routers are the solution for reducing computation time and power consumption by parallel processing on a chip. It is also essential to meet the scalability and complexity challenges for system-on-chip (SoC). In this article, we describe a parallel ray tracing application mapping on a mesh-based multicore NoC architecture. We describe an optimised ray tracing kernel and parallelisation strategies, varying the workload distribution statically and dynamically. In this work, we present results and timing performance of our parallel ray tracing application on a NoC, which are obtained through our cycle accurate multicore NoC simulator. Using a dynamic scheduling load balancing technique, we achieved a maximum speedup multiplier of 35.97 on an 8 × 8 networked processor array using a NoC as the interconnect.

Keywords:

• network-on-chip
• ray tracing
• parallel processing