[Savannah-hackers] submission of parrt - PARallel Ray Tracer - savannah.gnu.org

[a . samardzic]

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Aleksandar B. Samardzic <address@hidden> described the package as follows:
License: gpl
Other License: 
Package: parrt - PARallel Ray Tracer
System name: parrt
Type: GNU

Description:
parrt - PARallel (shared memory) Ray Tracer

parrt is a multi-threaded shared memory Ray Tracing program.  parrt
works as a regular UNIX filter accepting scene description in NFF formaton 
standard input and emitting image in PPM format to standard output. SPD 
package, available at:      
http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/SPD/overview.html
could be used to generate input scenes in NFF format. parrt implements both 
bounding volume hierarchy and voxel grid acceleration schemes for improving Ray 
Tracing efficiency.  It is developped primarily as a research tool regarding 
comparing and improving above efficiency schemes.

parrt is available at:      
http://www.matf.bg.ac.yu/~a.samardzic/projects/parrt-1.1.0.tar.gz
For installation instructions, see README file from archive.  For any questions 
(in particular, regarding providing input files), please contact author 
(address@hidden).

Other Software Required:
parrt depends on POSIX threads library or alternatively on OpenMP capable 
compiler.

Further clarification regarding OpenMP:
There exists no usable free OpenMP compiler; there exists a project
(http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gomp/) trying to provide OpenMP
support for gcc, but this is still not ready to be used.  So, according to 
Savannah policy, I provided implementation using POSIX threads for those people 
that don\'t have access to OpenMP capable compiler and on the other side it is 
possible to utilize OpenMP based implementation instead if someone wants to 
compile software using OpenMP capable C compiler.  Further, again according to 
Savannah policy, usage of POSIX threads is default and usage of OpenMP must be 
explicitly turned on by corresponding configure script option (./configure 
--with-impl=openmp). I\'m intending to keep developing POSIX threads 
implementation as primary option until eventual success of above mentioned gomp 
project (i.e. until gcc becomes OpenMP capable), then I\'ll probably switch to 
OpenMP as default (there are subtle advantages in using OpenMP regarding both 
execution efficiency and code readability).


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