High-performance Rendering Using the Supercomputer

One of the areas where massive exploitation of HPC occurs is the computer graphics, particularly synthesis of image or rendering of virtual scenes. Rendering has many practical areas of application, e.g. in mechanical engineering, industrial design, or entertainment industry.

To speed up the rendering process, it is possible to use not only graphic accelerators but also co-processors. The Intel Xeon Phi co-processor contains more than 60 cores and in cooperation with CPU it can reach, in many cases, multiple accelerations. This acceleration is also possible to be reached on Salomon supercomputer, where porting Blender Cycles, the freeware rendering system, on MIC co-processors has been made possible.