Summary
A Hardware-Assisted Scalable Solution for Interactive Volume Rendering of
Time-Varying Data
Authors:
Eric B. Lum and Kwan-Liu Ma, University of California, Davis
John Clyne, NCAR
Abstract
We present a scalable volume rendering technique that exploits lossy
compression and low-cost commodity hardware to permit highly
interactive exploration of time-varying scalar volume data. A
palette-based decoding technique and an adaptive bit allocation scheme
are developed to fully utilize the texturing capability of a commodity
3-D graphics card. Using a single PC equipped with a modest amount of
memory, a texture capable graphics card, and an inexpensive disk array,
we are able to render hundreds of time steps of regularly gridded
volume data (up to 42 millions voxels each time step) at interactive
rates. By clustering multiple PCs together we demonstrate the data-size
scalability of our method. The frame rates achieved make possible
the interactive exploration of data in the temporal, spatial, and
transfer function domains. A comprehensive evaluation of our method
based on experimental studies using data sets (up to 134 millions
voxels per time step) from turbulence flow simulations is also
presented.