Parallel radiosity techniques for mesh-connected SIMD computers

This thesis investigates parallel radiosity techniques for highly- parallel, mesh-connected SIMD computers. The approaches studies differ along the two orthogonal dimensions: the method of sampling-by ray-casting or by environment-project and the method of mapping of objects to processors - by object-space-based methods or by a balanced-load method. The environment- projection approach has been observed to perform better than the ray-casting approaches. For the dataset studied, the balanced-load method appears promising. Spatially subdividing the dataset without taking the potential light interactions into account has been observed to violate the locality property of radiosity. This suggests that object-space-based methods for radiosity must take visibility into account during subdivision to achieve any speedups based on exploiting the locality property of radiosity. This thesis also investigates the reuse patterns of form-factors in perfectly diffuse environments during radiosity iterations. Results indicate that reuse is sparse even when significant convergence is achieved.