First, pardon me if the idea presented below has already been done to death.

 From what I've seen, current methods for distributing a render involve 
dicing up the scene and having the separate processors render different 
parts of the scene, but with each processor using the same render database.

I had the half-baked idea of dividing up the render task a different 
way, and that is to split up the rendered scene among the separate 
processors.  One processor decides which rays get traced, and it sends a 
ray-intersection request to each of the processsors.  Each one does the 
tests against a smaller set of the data, and reports the results to the 
controlling processor.  This controller then interprets the results as 
need be.

Pros:
   * Scenes can now be larger without stressing memory limits.
   * Ray-intersection tests take less time.

Cons:
   * Communication time between processors may present an unacceptable 
bottleneck.

Regards,
John

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