Remote pipes and procedures for efficient distributed communication
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Promises: linguistic support for efficient asynchronous procedure calls in distributed systems
PLDI '88 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1988 conference on Programming Language design and Implementation
Communications in the mercury system
Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Hawaii International Conference on Software Track
Distributed systems: concepts and design
Distributed systems: concepts and design
Network computing architecture
Network computing architecture
Parallel processing for computer graphics
Parallel processing for computer graphics
Workstations, networking, distributed graphics, and parallel processing
Computer graphics techniques
A survey of asynchronous remote procedure calls
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
An improved illumination model for shaded display
Communications of the ACM
A survey of remote procedure calls
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
A Proposal for Standard Graphics Environments
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
| Hi-index | 0.24 |
A distributed ray tracer is implemented in a network of workstations using ASTRA, an asynchronous remote procedure call mechanism. The motivation of this work is to utilize the idle cycles available on workstations to speed up the execution of the ray tracing task. The application uses the client-server model with a central dispatcher as the client, sending ray tracing jobs to the servers which handle the actual ray tracing computations. A new job is given to a server that has completed its present job and successfully sent back the results. Performance tests are conducted on a group of homogeneous and heterogeneous workstations using different scene complexities and varying number of servers. Our results showed that for some of the databases, it is possible to achieve 64 times speedup with 85 servers. The paper discusses the ASTRA call primitives, the client and server parts of our distributed ray tracer program, and presents the results of the performance tests.