A data distributed, parallel algorithm for ray-traced volume rendering
- 30 December 2002
- conference paper
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Abstract
This paper presents a divide-and-conquer ray-traced volume rendering algorithm and a parallel image compositing method, along with their implementation and performance on the Connection Machine CM-5, and networked workstations. This algorithm distributes both the data and the computations to individual processing units to achieve fast, high-quality rendering of high-resolution data. The volume data, once distributed, is left intact. The processing nodes perform local raytracing of their subvolume concurrently. No communication between processing units is needed during this locally ray-tracing process. A subimage is generated by each processing unit and the final image is obtained by compositing subimages in the proper order, which can be determined a priori. Test results on the CM-5 and a group of networked workstations demonstrate the practicality of our rendering algorithm and compositing method.Keywords
This publication has 19 references indexed in Scilit:
- Fast rotation of volume data on parallel architecturesPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Parallel volume visualization on workstationsComputers & Graphics, 1993
- Data parallel volume rendering as line drawingPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1992
- Parallel volume visualization on a hypercube architecturePublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1992
- Volume rendering on scalable shared-memory MIMD architecturesPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1992
- Volume seeds: A volume exploration techniqueThe Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation, 1991
- Compositing digital imagesPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1984
- Near real-time shaded display of rigid objectsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1983
- Display Techniques for Octree-Encoded ObjectsIEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 1981
- Illumination for computer generated picturesCommunications of the ACM, 1975