A data distributed, parallel algorithm for ray-traced volume rendering
- Utah Univ., Salt Lake City, UT (United States). Dept. of Computer Science
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
This paper presents a divide-and-conquer ray-traced volume rendering algorithm and its implementation on networked workstations and a massively parallel computer, the Connection Machine CM-5. This algorithm distributes the data and the computational load to individual processing units to achieve fast, high-quality rendering of high-resolution data, even when only a modest amount of memory is available on each machine. The volume data, once distributed, is left intact. The processing nodes perform local ray-tracing of their subvolume concurrently. No communication between processing units is needed during this locally ray-tracing process. A subimage is generated by each processing unit and the final image is obtained by compositing subimages in the proper order, which can be determined a priori. Implementations and tests on a group of networked workstations and on the Thinking Machines CM-5 demonstrate the practicality of our algorithm and expose different performance tuning issues for each platform. We use data sets from medical imaging and computational fluid dynamics simulations in the study of this algorithm.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 10185612
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-93-3138; CONF-9310153-1; ON: DE93040150
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Parallel rendering symposium,San Jose, CA (United States),25 Oct 1993; Other Information: PBD: 30 Mar 1993
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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