Michael F. Krogh

Parallel volume rendering using binary-swap compositing

We describe a parallel volume-rendering algorithm, which consists of two parts: parallel ray tracing and parallel compositing. In the most recent implementation on Connection Machines CM-5 and networked workstations, the parallel volume renderer evenly distributes data to the computing resources available. Without the need to communicate with other processing units, each subvolume is ray traced locally and generates a partial image. The parallel compositing process then merges all resulting partial images in depth order to produce the complete image. The compositing algorithm is particularly effective for massively parallel processing, as it always uses all processing units by repeatedly subdividing the partial images and distributing them to the appropriate processing units. Test results on both the CM-5 and the workstations are promising. They do, however, expose different performance issues for each platform.<<ETX>>

A data distributed, parallel algorithm for ray-traced volume rendering

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.

Parallel sphere rendering

Sphere rendering is an important method for visualizing molecular dynamics data. This paper presents a parallel algorithm that is almost 90 times faster than current graphics workstations. To render extremely large data sets and large images, the algorithm uses the MIMD features of the supercomputers to divide up the data, render independent partial images, and then finally composite the multiple partial images using an optimal method. The algorithm and performance results are presented for the CM-5 and the T3D.