Using CPU-GPU cloud clusters as an OpenMP accelerator

Abstract

Rendering an image from a 3D scene requires a large amount of computation and designers need to use high-performance computer systems to keep the rendering time acceptable. They usually rent computing power directly from cloud service providers (e.g. AWS and Azure). However, integrating them within the standard workflow of modeling softwares can become a complex task. This project uses an extension of OpenMP 4.X 1-2 to eliminate any major interactions with the end-user, minimizing the complexity of cloud integration and optimizing the workflow. It applies such approach to a ray-tracing application, a simplified version of the engines used by professional 3D modeling software (e.g. Blender 3). It automatically offloads the rendering process from the user computer to computer cluster within the Microsoft Azure cloud, brings the resulting images back after the computation ends and displays them directly on the screen of the user computer, thus providing a transparent programming model and good speed-ups over local execution.