Summary

Massively Parallel Software Rendering for Visualizing Large-Scale Data Sets

Authors:

Kwan-Liu Ma, UC Davis
Steven Parker, University of Utah

Abstract

For some time, production visualization was almost exclusively done by using high-end graphics workstations. Generally, rendering of the data on the graphics workstation was preceded by a feature extraction step and a geometric modeling step to significantly reduce the size of the data to be rendered. While the graphics workstation allowed interactive visualization of the extracted data, looking only at a lower resolution and polygonal representation of the data defeated the original purpose of performing the high-resolution simulation/scanning. In this article, the authors describe two highly scalable, parallel software volume-rendering algorithms-one renders unstructured grid volume data and the other renders isosurfaces.