Global Static Indexing for Real-Time Exploration of Very Large Regular Grids

In this paper we introduce a new indexing scheme for progressive traversal and visualization of large regular grids. We demonstrate the potential of our approach by providing a tool that displays at interactive rates planar slices of scalar field data with very modest computing resources. We obtain unprecedented results both in terms of absolute performance and, more importantly, in terms of scalability. On a lap-top computer we provide real time interaction with a 20483 grid (8 Giga-nodes) using only 20MB of memory. On an SGI Onyx we slice interactively an 81923 grid (½ tera-nodes) using only 60MB of memory. The scheme relies simply on the determination of an appropriate reordering of the rectilinear grid data and a progressive construction of the output slice. The reordering minimizes the amount of I/O performed during the out-of-core computation. The progressive and asynchronous computation of the output provides flexible quality/speed tradeoffs and a time-critical and interruptible user interface.