Comparing Binary-Swap Algorithms for Odd Factors of Processes

A key component of most large-scale rendering systems is a parallel image compositing algorithm, and the most commonly used compositing algorithms are binary swap and its variants. Although shown to be very efficient, one of the classic limitations of binary swap is that it only works on a number of processes that is a perfect power of 2. Multiple variations of binary swap have been independently introduced to overcome this limitation and handle process counts that have factors that are not 2. To date, few of these approaches have been directly compared against each other, making it unclear which approach is best. This paper presents a fresh implementation of each of these methods using a common software framework to make them directly comparable. These methods to run binary swap with odd factors are directly compared. The results show that some simple compositing approaches work as well or better than more complex algorithms that are more difficult to implement.