Efficient distributed ray tracing on a cluster of workstations

This paper describes, discusses, and analyzes the design of a distributed system for the generation of ray-traced images. The platform used in the system which consists of a cluster of workstations with a network file system, provides a flexible, cost effective, and yet powerful distributed computing environment. The distributed system utilizes the Supervisor-Worker paradigm far distributing and coordinating the parallel tasks of image generation. This paradigm permits flexibility in the degree of concurrency in the system as well as a level of fault tolerance Enhancements to the ray-tracing technique for image generation are also described in this paper.