Distributed Volume Rendering for Scalable High-Resolution Display Arrays

May 17th, 2010

Categories: Applications, Networking, Software, Supercomputing, Visualization

Scientist examining the rat kidney dataset on a 100 mega pixel display
Scientist examining the rat kidney dataset on a 100 mega pixel display

Authors

Schwarz, N., Leigh, J.

About

GRAPP 2010 Website

This work presents a distributed image-order volume rendering approach for scalable high-resolution displays. This approach reprocesses data into a conventional hierarchical structure which is distributed across the local storage of a distributed-memory cluster. The cluster is equipped with graphics cards capable of hardware accelerated texture rendering. The novel contribution of this work is its unique data management scheme that spans both GPU and CPU memory using a multi-level cache and distributed shared-memory system. Performance results show that the system scales as output resolution and cluster size increase. An implementation of this approach allows scientists to quasi-interactively visualize large volume datasets on scalable high-resolution display arrays.

Keywords: High-resolution display arrays, direct volume rendering, parallel rendering, graphics systems and distributed shared-memory.

Resources

PDF

Citation

Schwarz, N., Leigh, J., Distributed Volume Rendering for Scalable High-Resolution Display Arrays, GRAPP 2010 - Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications, Angers, France, May 17th, 2010.