A scalable MIMD volume rendering algorithm

Volume rendering is a compute intensive graphics algorithm with wide application. Researchers have sought to speed it up using parallel computers. The algorithm distributes the data for storage efficiency, avoids bottlenecks, and scales to more processors than rays. The main contribution is explicit partitioning of the input volume for higher memory utilization, while retaining viewpoint freedom and speedup. The largest volumes processed on the MIMD (multiple instruction multiple data) machine (Proteus) are 512×512×128 voxels (32 Mbytes). Performance measurements show a speedup of 22 over sequential code on 32 Intel i860 processors. We have used no preprocessing or data dependent optimization. The efficiency results from nonconflicting communication, a permutation warp, that remains efficient with larger data sets, larger parallel machines, and high order filters showing scalability can be achieved through object space partitioning