Real-Time Ray Tracing on the Cell Processor

Abstract: The first ray casting algorithm was introduced as early as 1966 and was followed by the first ray tracing algorithm in 1979. Since then many revisions to both these algorithms have been presented along with the strong development of computer processors. For a very long time both ray casting and ray tracing were associated with rendering of single images. One single image could take several hours to compute and to date still can for very complex scenes. Only during the last few years have attempts to write algorithms for real time been made. This thesis focuses on the question of how a real time ray caster can be mapped on the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture. It addresses the development of a ray caster on a single unit processor and then goes through the steps on how to rewrite an application to exploit the full potential of the cell broadband engine. This includes identifying the compute intensive parts of the application and parallelizing these over all the available elements in the cell architecture.