The HiQoS rendering system

Abstract

Simulation of global illumination in 3D scenes is a computationally expensive task. One of the goals of the project HiQoS (High Performance Multimedia Services with Quality of Service Guarantees) was to develop and test a prototype of an e-commerce system which simulates realistic lighting of large scenes on high performance parallel computers. The system, although tailored to the needs of this specific application, is very generic and exhibits meta computing features: 1.the access to high performance computers is fully transparent to the user; 2.the modular architecture of the system allows to dynamically add or remove computing resources in geographically different computing centers. The prototype of the proposed system was evaluated in the industrial contexts of architectural visualization and film production. This paper summarizes scientific and technical problems which arose during the project as well as their solutions and engineering decisions.