An image compositing solution at scale

Abstract

The only proven method for performing distributed-memory parallel rendering at large scales, tens of thousands of nodes, is a class of algorithms called sort last. The fundamental operation of sort-last parallel rendering is an image composite, which combines a collection of images generated independently on each node into a single blended image. Over the years numerous image compositing algorithms have been proposed as well as several enhancements and rendering modes to these core algorithms. However, the testing of these image compositing algorithms has been with an arbitrary set of enhancements, if any are applied at all. In this paper we take a leading production-quality image-compositing framework, IceT, and use it as a testing framework for the leading image compositing algorithms of today. As we scale IceT to ever increasing job sizes, we consider the image compositing systems holistically, incorporate numerous optimizations, and discover several improvements to the process never considered before. We conclude by demonstrating our solution on 64K cores of the Intrepid Blue-Gene/P at Argonne National Laboratories.

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