Towards a Scalable Architecture for Real-Time Volume Rendering
Hanspeter Pfister, Arie E. Kaufman, Frank Wessels · 1995
In this paper we present our research efforts towards a scalable volume rendering architecture for the real-time visualization of dynamically changing high-resolution datasets. Using a linearly skewed memory interleav ing we were able to develop a parallel dataflow model that leads to local, fixed-bandwidth interconnections be tween processing elements. This parallel dataflow model differs from previous work in that it requires no global communication of data except at the pixel level. Us ing this dataflow model we are developing Cube-4, an architecture that is scalable to very high performances and allows for modular and extensible hardware imple mentations.