An optimal parallel algorithm for volume ray casting

Author

Goel, Vineet ; Mukherjee, Amar

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Central Florida Univ., Orlando, FL, USA

fYear

1995

fDate

6-9 Feb 1995

Firstpage

238

Lastpage

245

Abstract

Volume rendering by ray casting is a computationally expensive problem. For interactive volume visualization, rendering has to be done in real time (30 frames/sec). Since the typical 3-D dataset size is 256 ³ the use of parallel processing is imperative. In this paper, we present an O(log n) EREW algorithm for volume rendering using O(n³) processors which can be optimized to O(log³ n) time using O(n³/log³ n) processors. We have implemented our algorithm on MasPar MP1200. The implementation results show that a frame from 256³ data size is generated in 11 seconds using 4096 processors. This time can be further reduced by using a large number of processors

Keywords

parallel algorithms; rendering (computer graphics); EREW algorithm; interactive volume visualization; parallel algorithm; ray casting; rendering; volume ray casting; volume rendering; volume visualization; Casting; Computer architecture; Computer science; Costs; Data visualization; Interpolation; Parallel algorithms; Parallel processing; Prototypes; Rendering (computer graphics);

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, 1995. Proceedings. Frontiers '95., Fifth Symposium on the

Conference_Location

McLean, VA

Print_ISBN

0-8186-6965-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/FMPC.1995.380443

Filename

380443