Milan Jaros
ABSTRACT
The scene rendering is a demanding procedure which is used to create images and movies from scenes modelled in proper software environments such as open source 3D creation suite Blender. Generally the rendering can be used in two basic modes. Off-line, used for final production, and interactive mode, run in real-time, for preliminary insight during modelling. Both kinds pose a computationally challenging task especially for large scenes. In this paper, we describe our implemented parallel solution which utilizes Intel Xeon Phi co-processors for either stand-alone computer nodes or HPC (High Performance Computing) clusters in off-line and interactive rendering mode.
For modelling of the scenes and their rendering Blender was used. We have extended native Blender's Cycles renderer into, as we call it, CyclesPhi [1]. The CyclesPhi is developed to support and utilize Intel Xeon Phi in HPC clusters. The parallelization described in this paper is done using hybrid MPI/OpenMP concept. This implementation utilizes two typical modes of Intel Xeon Phi, the offload and the symmetric mode. To demonstrate efficiency of our implementation, runtime comparison as well as strong scalability are presented.
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Index Terms
- Rendering in Blender Cycles using MPI and Intel® Xeon Phi™
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