, Cam-Thach Nguyen

This project examines the problem of visual simulation of virtual environment that is too large to fit into the main memory of a PC. We broadly classify the problem into three subproblems: render, query and prefetch, which correspond, respectively, to processing data to be displayed, identifying and organizing data to be retrieved, and retrieving (identified) data into main memory in anticipation of the need to render them in the near future. Unlike the first two subproblems, there is little existing work that reports the prefetch subproblem in detail. Some existing applications adopt advanced data indexing and layout in an application specific way but leave the operating system to do the actual fetching (paging) of data during runtime (see, for example, [LiPa02]). There are also approaches that use speculative prefetching based on the viewer’s current position and velocity to prefetch data needed for future frames (see, for example, [CGLL98]). These ar