HP Labs Technical Reports

Extensions to Permutation Warping for Parallel Volume Rendering

Wittenbrink, Craig

HPL-97-116R1

Keyword(s): SIMD, MIMD, MasPar, volume visualization, parallel algorithms

Abstract: Biomedical volume visualization requires high quality and high performance, but the existing high performance solutions such as the Shear Warp algorithm, 3D texture mapping, and special purpose hardware have problems. Permutation warping achieves high fidelity for biomedical datasets of regular rectilinear volumes, using a one-to-one communication scheme for optimal O(1) communication on massively parallel computers. Extensions are presented including data dependent optimizations using octrees, arbitrary view angles flexibility, and multiple instruction stream multiple data stream (MIMD) implementation. A MasPar MP-2, single instruction stream multiple data stream (SIMD) (16,384 processor), implementation achieves 14 frames/second, using trilinear reconstruction on 128cubed volumes for 400% runtime improvement over our previous result. A Proteus MIMD (32 processor) implementation achieves 1 frame/second on the same data. Additionally the PermWeb software architecture is presented, that has shown as a proof of concept means to provide wide shared access to a powerful centralized rendered. All of these improvements make permutation warping an effective solution for biomedical volume visualization.

20 Pages

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