MPI-hybrid Parallelism for Volume Rendering on Large, Multi-core Systems

Conference · 20 March 2010

OSTI ID:983174

Howison, Mark; Bethel, E Wes; Childs, Hank

This work studies the performance and scalability characteristics of"hybrid'" parallel programming and execution as applied to raycasting volume rendering -- a staple visualization algorithm -- on a large, multi-core platform. Historically, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become the de-facto standard for parallel programming and execution on modern parallel systems. As the computing industry trends towards multi-core processors, with four- and six-core chips common today and 128-core chips coming soon, we wish to better understand how algorithmic and parallel programming choices impact performance and scalability on large, distributed-memory multi-core systems. Our findings indicate that the hybrid-parallel implementation, at levels of concurrency ranging from 1,728 to 216,000, performs better, uses a smaller absolute memory footprint, and consumes less communication bandwidth than the traditional, MPI-only implementation.

• Research Organization: Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: Computational Research Division
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 983174
• Report Number(s): LBNL-3297E
• Conference Information: Eurographics 2010 Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, Norrkoeping, Sweden, May 2-3, 2010
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
ALGORITHMS
COMMUNICATIONS
IMPLEMENTATION
multi-core parallel
hybrid parallelism
parallel volume rendering
PERFORMANCE
PROGRAMMING