In the 1980s it was believed computer performance was best improved by creating faster and more e cient processors. This idea was challenged by parallel processing, which in essence means linking together two or more computers to jointly solve a computational problem. Since the early 1990s there has been an increasing trend to move away from expensive and specialized proprietary parallel superc...

This paper examines the eeectiveness of load balancing strategies for ray tracing on large parallel computersystems and cluster computers. Popular static load balancing strategiesare shown to be inadequate for rendering complex images with contemporary ray tracing algorithms, and for rendering NTSC resolution images on 128 or more computers. Strategies based on image tiling are shown to be inee...