Client-server based ray-tracer using ASTRA: An asynchronous RPC mechanism

Abstract

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.