Interactive volume rendering on a multicomputer
Ulrich Neumann · 1992
Direct volume rendering is a computationally intensive operation that has become a valued and often preferred visualization tool.For maximal data comprehension, interactive manipulation of the rendering parameters is desirable.To this end, a reasonable target would be a system capable of displaying 12E3 voxel data sets at multiple frames per second.Although the computing resources required to attain this performance are beyond those available in current uniprocessor workstations, multicomputers and VLSI rendering hardware offer a solution.This paper describes a volume rendering algorithm for MIMD message passing multicomputers.This algorithm addresses the issues of distributed rendering, data set distribution, load balancing, and contention for the routing network.An implementation on a multicomputer with a 1 D ring network is analyzed, and extension of the algorithm to a 2D mesh topology is described.In addition, the paper presents a method of exploiting screen coherence through the use of VLSI pixel processor arrays.Though not critical to the general algorithm, this rendering approach is demonstrated in the example implementation where it serves as a hardware accelerator of the rendering process.Commercial graphics workstations use pixel processors to accelerate polygon rendering; this paper proposes a new use of this hardware for accelerating volume rendering.