  We investigate the concept of rendering production-style content with full
path tracing in a data-distributed fashion -- that is, with multiple
collaborating nodes and/or GPUs that each store only part of the model. In
particular, we propose a new approach to tracing rays across different
nodes/GPUs that improves over traditional spatial partitioning, can support
both object-space and spatial partitioning (or any combination thereof), and
that enables multiple techniques for reducing the number of rays sent across
the network. We show that this approach can handle different kinds of model
partitioning strategies, and can ultimately render non-trivial models with full
path tracing even on quite moderate hardware resources with rather low-end
interconnect.
