Distributed Volume Rendering for Scalable High-Resolution Display Arrays

Abstract: This work presents a distributed image-order volume rendering approach for scalable high-resolution displays. This approach preprocesses data into a conventional hierarchical structure which is distributed across the local storage of a distributed-memory cluster. The cluster is equipped with graphics cards capable of hardware accelerated texture rendering. The novel contribution of this work is its unique data management scheme that spans both GPU and CPU memory using a multi-level cache and distributed shared-memory system. Performance results show that the system scales as output resolution and cluster size increase. An implementation of this approach allows scientists to quasi-interactively visualize large volume datasets on scalable high-resolution display arrays.