In real-time rendering of massive data sets, it is a common solution to use PC clusters for the real-time parallel rendering. The image composition of all the results in parallel rendered by the cluster computers is a notorious bottleneck in sort-last clustered rendering systems. This paper presented a network processing unit (NPU) -based image composition method and a sort-last distributed rendering system, called NPUPR. The experimental results show that the NPU-based scheme can get three times faster frame rate than the ' direct send scheme' in the case of four rendering nodes. This paper also presented a scheme to extend four rendering nodes to more rendering nodes. Analysis shows that, the system is fully scalable with negligible penalty in frame rate.%随着绘制任务复杂度和绘制数据规模不断增长,使用PC集群进行分布式并行绘制是一个常用的解决方案.sort-last分布式并行绘制方法具有好的扩展性和负载平衡,但由于图像合成瓶颈的限制,绘制速度不能满足实时需求.提出一个使用网络处理单元(NPU)来进行快速硬件图像合成的方法,开发了一个sort-last并行绘制系统NPUPR.实验表明,针对4个绘制节点,基于NPU的硬件图像合成方法与direct send的合成算法相比,绘制速度有了4倍的提高.也给出通过增加网络处理单元来扩展系统支持更多绘制节点的方案,分析表明,系统图像合成性能不会随节点个数的增加而明显降低.
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