The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 20, 2012
Filed:
Nov. 28, 2006
Jeffrey Douglas Brown, Rochester, MN (US);
Russell Dean Hoover, Rochester, MN (US);
Eric Oliver Mejdrich, Rochester, MN (US);
Jeffrey Douglas Brown, Rochester, MN (US);
Russell Dean Hoover, Rochester, MN (US);
Eric Oliver Mejdrich, Rochester, MN (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
According to embodiments of the invention, a normally recursive ray tracing algorithm may be partitioned to form an iterative ray tracing algorithm. The resulting portions of the iterative ray tracing algorithm may be executed by a plurality of processing elements. Furthermore, according to embodiments of the invention, a network of inboxes may be used to transfer information which defines original rays and secondary rays (information unlikely to be reused for subsequently issued rays and subsequently rendered frames) between processing elements, and a shared memory cache may store information relating to a three dimensional scene (information likely to be reused for subsequently issued rays and subsequently rendered frames). Using a plurality of processing elements to perform ray tracing and storing information in the shared memory cache which is likely to be reused for subsequent rays and subsequent frames, the performance of a ray tracing image processing system may be improved.