Distributed Ray Tracer

32 points7 comments5 hours ago
keithwinstein

Cool! You might like our paper/demo on ray-tracing 1 TB-geometry scenes using thousands of AWS Lambda workers spun up just for the job: https://r2e2.dev/

This was led by my former PhD student Sadjad Fouladi who did a lot of creative work involving swarms of short-lived serverless functions for video encoding and distributed LLM inference (https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi17/technical-sessions/...) and software compilation (https://github.com/stanfordsnr/gg).

abelanger

Some more resources on signed distance fields (SDFs), which I didn't know about until this demo:

- https://iquilezles.org/articles/distfunctions/

- The 2D version: https://iquilezles.org/articles/distfunctions2d/ (discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380054)

- How Zed uses (used?) SDFs to render their editor: https://zed.dev/blog/videogame (discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35078464)

carterunworthy

I love Hatchet! A serverless render farm is such a silly idea, results coming in felt really cool though, I'd love to see this scaled up to frames of an animation.

nla

Some much needed innovation! Well done, old boy.

ginko

Isn't exposing something like this to the web asking for huge cloudflare bills?

amelius

Does it pass the pelican on a bicycle test?

xyzsparetimexyz

Yeah.. Or you could just use a gpu?