This paper presents a prototype of a distributed 3D rendering system in a hierarchical Grid environment. 3D rendering with massive data sets is a computationally intensive task. In order to make full use of computational resources on Grids, a hierarchical system architecture is designed to run over multiple clusters. This architecture involves both sort-first and sort-last parallel rendering algorithms to achieve excellent scalability, rendering performance and load balance.

Phonetic string search of written text is an important topic in Information Retrieval. While most of the previous methods convert a string into intermediate codes with phonetic transformation rules, this paper proposes a novel algorithm to segment two phonetic strings into syllables and find the optimal pairing of the corresponding syllables to calculate their similarity score. The experiment shows that this method is very effective and flexible. It can be easily adapted to different datasets and achieves optimal performance on average.