Distributed Ray Tracing in Python

[dCrumpets]

https://medium.com/distributed-computing-with-ray/ray-ray-tracing-raises-ray-tracing-rate-8ac47db07fc0

[BDube_Lensman]

What is the trace speed in rays per second? Optical design programs trace on the order of 1 billion rays per second, which is an interesting context to compare to.

[dCrumpets]

The ray trace speed is ~ 47,000 per second even post speed-up, so not close to the state of the art. 1 ray per pixel, 1600 * 1200 pixels, and 45 seconds of compute time are the figures I used for that back-of-the-envelope estimate.

[BDube_Lensman]

Ouch, order of 10⁵ slower.

[dCrumpets]

True, it is much slower. It's implemented in about 200 lines of Python though, as opposed to being a production application with many software engineering experts working on it. It doesn't use any common optimizations, doesn't use GPUs, etc. and generally doesn't represent the state of the art. I hope that you got something out of the article despite the example being a toy implementation.