Evaluation of per-pixel linked lists for distributed rendering and comparative analysis

Rendering scenes with overlapping transparent faces is challenging for several reasons, including sorting geometry, managing multiple per-pixel fragments, and compositing. These questions have been solved for local rendering previously, for example by order-independent transparency approaches like Depth Peeling or A-buffer implementations. We discuss order-independent transparency algorithms in context of distributed rendering for large data sets or simulations which by design split the work load among a number of computation nodes. Furthermore, we evaluate a per-pixel linked list approach for distributed mesh rendering and multi-variant analysis of molecule data sets.