Parallel raytracing: a case study on partitioning and scheduling on workstation clusters

A case study is presented which is aimed at investigating the performance of several parallel versions of the POV-Ray ray-tracing package implemented on a workstation cluster using the MPI message-passing library. Based on a manager/worker scheme, variants of workload partitioning and message scheduling strategies, in conjunction with different task granularities, are evaluated with respect to their runtime behaviour. The results indicate that dynamic, adaptive strategies are required to cope with both the unbalanced workload characteristics of the parallel ray-tracing application and the different computational capabilities of the machines in a workstation cluster environment.