Parallel rendering of fractal surfaces (Q1114456)

Fractal surfaces are a useful modeling technique for terrain in computer graphics. Although an algorithm exists for ray tracing (Mandelbrot) fractal surfaces, the technique is computationally very expensive. The large degree of parallelism inherent in the problem suggests the use of parallel architectures for generating these images. We describe a parallel rendering algorithm for shared memory MIMD machines which takes advantage of image coherence to reduce computation. This algorithm has, on a Sequent Balance 21000 with 20 processors, demonstrated a near-linear speedup. We examine the possible synchronization bottlenecks by statically assigning different numbers of CPU's to sections of the screen.