Parallel volume rendering and data coherence on the Fujitsu AP1000

Abstract

Many scientific and engineering disciplines, through physical measurements or computational simulations, generate large scale three-dimensional data sets. Both the physical size and the computational resources needed to render these data sets present a challenge to current rendering architectures and techniques. The Fujitsu AP1000 has the memory capacity and the processing speed to render large three-dimensional data sets at interactive or near-interactive speeds. A parallel version of a volume renderer has been implemented using a ray-casting technique on this architecture. The two key issues in implementing this technique on a distributed memory, MIMD machine such as the AP1000 are the work and data distribution. To perform the data distribution, a distributed virtual memory for volume data is used. The importance of utilizing the data coherence that is inherent in volume data is demonstrated through the analysis of several case studies. Show more