Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization (2004) Dirk Bartz, Bruno Rafn and Han-Wei Shen (Editors) Parallel Multiresolution Volume Rendering of Large Data Sets with Error-Guided Load Balancing

We present a new parallel multiresolution volume rendering algorithm for visualizing large data sets. Using the wavelet transform, the raw data is rst converted into a multiresolution wavelet tree. To eliminate the parent-child data dependency for reconstruction and achieve load-balanced rendering, we design a novel algorithm to parti-tion the tree and distribute the data along a hierarchical space-lling curve with error-guided bucketization. At run time, the wavelet tree is traversed according to the user-specied error tolerance, data blocks of different res-olutions are decompressed and rendered to compose the nal image in parallel. Experimental results showed that our algorithm can reduce the run-time communication cost to a minimum and ensure a well-balanced workload among processors when visualizing gigabytes of data with arbitrary error tolerances