Parallel rendering of 3D AMR data on the SGI/Cray T3E

Author

Ma, Kwan-Liu

Author_Institution

Inst. for Comput. Applications in Sci. & Eng., NASA Langley Res. Center, Hampton, VA, USA

fYear

1999

fDate

21-25 Feb 1999

Firstpage

138

Lastpage

145

Abstract

This paper describes work-in-progress on developing parallel visualization strategies for 3D Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data. AMR is a simple and powerful tool for modeling many important scientific and engineering problems. However visualization tools for 3D AMR data are not generally available. Converting AMR data onto a uniform mesh would result in high storage requirements, and rendering the uniform-mesh data on an average graphics workstation can be painfully slow if not impossible. The adaptive nature of the embedded mesh demands sophisticated visualization calculations. In this work, we compare the performance and storage requirements of a parallel volume renderer for regular-mesh data with a new parallel renderer based on adaptive sampling. While both renderers can achieve interactive visualization, the new approach offers significant performance gains, as indicated by our experiments on the SGI/Cray T3E

Keywords

data visualisation; parallel algorithms; rendering (computer graphics); 3D Adaptive Mesh Refinement; AMR; adaptive sampling; parallel renderer; parallel visualization strategies; parallel volume renderer; rendering; visualization tools; Adaptive mesh refinement; Computer applications; Data visualization; Graphics; NASA; Packaging; Power engineering and energy; Rendering (computer graphics); Runtime; Supercomputers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, 1999. Frontiers '99. The Seventh Symposium on the

Conference_Location

Annapolis, MD

Print_ISBN

0-7695-0087-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/FMPC.1999.750593

Filename

750593