skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Rendering and Compositing Infrastructure Improvements to VisIt for Insitu Rendering

Abstract

Compared to posthoc rendering, insitu rendering often generates larger numbers of images, as a result rendering performance and scalability are critical in the insitu setting. In this work we present improvements to VisIt's rendering and compositing infrastructure that deliver increased performance and scalability in both posthoc and insitu settings. We added the capability for alpha blend compositing and use it with ordered compositing when datasets have disjoint block domain decomposition to optimize the rendering of transparent geometry. We also made improvements that increase overall efficiency by reducing communication and data movement and have addressed a number of performance issues. We structured our code to take advantage of SIMD parallelization and use threads to overlap communication and compositing. We tested our improvements on a 20 core workstation using 8 cores to render geometry generated from a $256^3$ cosmology dataset and on a Cray XC31 using 512 cores to render geometry generated from a $$2000^2 \times 800$$ plasma dataset. Our results show that ordered compositing provides a speed up of up to $$4 \times$$ over the current sort first strategy. The other improvements resulted in modest speed up with one notable exception where we achieve up to $$40 \times$$ speed up ofmore » rendering and compositing of opaque geometry when both opaque and transparent geometry are rendered together. We also investigated the use of depth peeling, but found that the implementation provided by VTK is substantially slower,both with and without GPU acceleration, than a local camera order sort.« less

Authors:
 [1];  [1]
  1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
OSTI Identifier:
1237686
Report Number(s):
LBNL-1004236
ir:1004236
DOE Contract Number:  
AC02-05CH11231
Resource Type:
Technical Report
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING

Citation Formats

Loring, Burlen, and Ruebel, Oliver. Rendering and Compositing Infrastructure Improvements to VisIt for Insitu Rendering. United States: N. p., 2016. Web. doi:10.2172/1237686.
Loring, Burlen, & Ruebel, Oliver. Rendering and Compositing Infrastructure Improvements to VisIt for Insitu Rendering. United States. https://doi.org/10.2172/1237686
Loring, Burlen, and Ruebel, Oliver. 2016. "Rendering and Compositing Infrastructure Improvements to VisIt for Insitu Rendering". United States. https://doi.org/10.2172/1237686. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1237686.
@article{osti_1237686,
title = {Rendering and Compositing Infrastructure Improvements to VisIt for Insitu Rendering},
author = {Loring, Burlen and Ruebel, Oliver},
abstractNote = {Compared to posthoc rendering, insitu rendering often generates larger numbers of images, as a result rendering performance and scalability are critical in the insitu setting. In this work we present improvements to VisIt's rendering and compositing infrastructure that deliver increased performance and scalability in both posthoc and insitu settings. We added the capability for alpha blend compositing and use it with ordered compositing when datasets have disjoint block domain decomposition to optimize the rendering of transparent geometry. We also made improvements that increase overall efficiency by reducing communication and data movement and have addressed a number of performance issues. We structured our code to take advantage of SIMD parallelization and use threads to overlap communication and compositing. We tested our improvements on a 20 core workstation using 8 cores to render geometry generated from a $256^3$ cosmology dataset and on a Cray XC31 using 512 cores to render geometry generated from a $2000^2 \times 800$ plasma dataset. Our results show that ordered compositing provides a speed up of up to $4 \times$ over the current sort first strategy. The other improvements resulted in modest speed up with one notable exception where we achieve up to $40 \times$ speed up of rendering and compositing of opaque geometry when both opaque and transparent geometry are rendered together. We also investigated the use of depth peeling, but found that the implementation provided by VTK is substantially slower,both with and without GPU acceleration, than a local camera order sort.},
doi = {10.2172/1237686},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1237686}, journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {Thu Jan 28 00:00:00 EST 2016},
month = {Thu Jan 28 00:00:00 EST 2016}
}