An Optimal Parallel Algorithm For Volume Ray Casting

Volume rendering by ray casting is computationally expensive. For interactive volume visualization, rendering must be done in real time (30 frames/s). Since the typical size of a 3D dataset is 256(3), parallel processing is imperative. In this paper, we present an O(log n) EREW algorithm for volume rendering. We use O(n(3)) processors that can be optimized to O(log(3) n) time with O(n(3)/log(3)n) processors. We have implemented our algorithm on a MasPar MP-1. The implementation results show that a frame of size 256(3) is generated in Ils by 4096 processors. This time can be further reduced by the use of large number of processors