Interactive Volume Visualization on a Heterogeneous Message-Passing Multicomputer

This paper describes VOL2, an interactive general-purpose volume renderer based on ray casting and implemented on Pixel-Planes 5, a distributed-memory, message-passing multicomputer. VOL2 is a pipelined renderer using image-space task parallelism and object-space data partitioning. We describe the parallelization and load balancing techniques used in order to achieve interactive response and near-real-time frame rates. We also present a number of applications for our system and derive some general conclusions about operation of image-order rendering algorithms on message-passing multicomputers.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: SI3D
• Authors: Andrei State, Jonathan McAllister, Ulrich Neumann, Hong Chen, Tim J. Cullip, David T. Chen, Henry Fuchs
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, General-purpose Volume Renderer, Message-passing Multicomputers, Pipelined Renderer, SI3D 1995