A unified infrastructure for parallel out-of-core isosurface extraction and volume rendering of unstructured grids

Yi Jen Chiang, R. Farias, C. T. Silva, Bin Wei

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We present a unified infrastructure for parallel out-of-core isosurface extraction and volume rendering of large unstructured grids on distributed-memory parallel machines. We parallelize the out-of-core isosurface extraction algorithm of Chiang et al. (1998) and the out-of-core ZSweep technique (Farias and Silva, 2001) for direct volume rendering, using the meta-cell technique as a unified underlying building block. Our one-time preprocessing first partitions the dataset into meta-cells that are stored in disk. From the meta-cells, we build a BBIO tree in disk, which can be used to speed up isosurface extraction, and a bounding-box file in disk, which is used for direct volume rendering. At run-time, we use a simple self-scheduling scheme to achieve load balancing among the processors. We perform several experiments on a sixteen-node cluster of PCs connected by a gigabit Ethernet, using datasets as large as 6.6 million cells. For the larger datasets, we have found that both our isosurface extraction and direct volume rendering approaches are perfectly scalable up to sixteen nodes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - IEEE 2001 Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics
EditorsStephen N. Spencer
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages59-66
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)0780372239, 9780780372238
DOIs
StatePublished - 2001
EventIEEE Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics - San Diego, United States
Duration: Oct 22 2001Oct 23 2001

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE 2001 Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics

Other

OtherIEEE Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Diego
Period10/22/0110/23/01

Keywords

  • Isosurface Extraction
  • Out-Of-Core Techniques
  • Parallel Computation
  • Scientific Visualization
  • Volume Rendering

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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