The RADIANCE lighting simulation and rendering system
SIGGRAPH '94 Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Parallelization of radiance for real time interactive lighting visualization walkthroughs
SC '99 Proceedings of the 1999 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
A ray tracing solution for diffuse interreflection
SIGGRAPH '88 Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Realistic image synthesis using photon mapping
Realistic image synthesis using photon mapping
MPI-parallelized Radiance on SGI CoW and SMP
ParNum '99 Proceedings of the 4th International ACPC Conference Including Special Tracks on Parallel Numerics and Parallel Computing in Image Processing, Video Processing, and Multimedia: Parallel Computation
An approximate global illumination system for computer generated films
ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Papers
Radiance Caching for Efficient Global Illumination Computation
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Ray tracing deformable scenes using dynamic bounding volume hierarchies
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
Radiance caching for participating media
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
Accelerating the irradiance cache through parallel component-based rendering
EG PGV'06 Proceedings of the 6th Eurographics conference on Parallel Graphics and Visualization
Towards a software transactional memory for graphics processors
EG PGV'10 Proceedings of the 10th Eurographics conference on Parallel Graphics and Visualization
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The irradiance cache (IC) is an acceleration data structure which caches indirect diffuse irradiance values within the context of a ray tracing algorithm. In multi-threaded shared memory parallel systems the IC must be shared among rendering threads in order to achieve high efficiency levels. Since all threads read and write from it an access control mechanism is required, which ensures that the data structure is not corrupted. Besides assuring correct accesses to the IC this access mechanism must incur minimal overheads such that performance is not compromised. In this paper we propose a new wait-free access mechanism to the shared irradiance cache. Wait-free data structures, unlike traditional access control mechanisms, do not make use of any blocking or busy waiting, avoiding most serialisation and reducing contention. We compare this technique with two other classical approaches: a lock based mechanism and a local write technique, where each thread maintains its own cache of locally evaluated irradiance values. We demonstrate that the wait-free approach significantly reduces synchronisation overheads compared to the two other approaches and that it increases data sharing over the local copy technique. This is, to the extent of our knowledge, the first work explicitly addressing access to a shared IC; this problem is becoming more and more relevant with the advent of multicore systems and the ever increasing number of processors within these systems.