Toward the Graphics Turing Scale on a Blue Gene Supercomputer

Abstract: We investigate raytracing performance that can be achieved on a class of Blue Gene supercomputers. We measure a 822 times speedup over a Pentium IV on a 6144 processor Blue Gene/L. We measure the computational performance as a function of number of processors and problem size to determine the scaling performance of the raytracing calculation on the Blue Gene. We find nontrivial scaling behavior at large number of processors. We discuss applications of this technology to scientific visualization with advanced lighting and high resolution. We utilize three racks of a Blue Gene/L in our calculations which is less than three percent of the the capacity of the worlds largest Blue Gene computer.