Parallel Ray Tracing of Black Hole Images Using the Schwarzschild Metric

Abstract

Rendering images of black holes by utilizing ray tracing techniques is a common methodology employed in many aspects of scientific and astrophysical visualizations. Similarly, general ray tracing techniques are widely used in areas related to computer graphics. In this work we describe the implementation of a parallel open-source program that can ray trace images in the presence of a black hole geometry. We do this by combining a couple of different techniques usually present in parallel scientific computing, such as, mathematical approximations, utilization of scientific libraries, shared-memory and distributed-memory parallelism.