Performance Experiments with the StormView Distributed Parallel Volume Renderer. Computer Science

Volume rendering is a useful but cpu-intensive method for visualizing large scalar elds. The time to render a single image may be reduced by parallel processing. This paper reports on performance experiments with the StormView volume renderer, which is parallelized on a set of 57 MIPS / 17 MFLOPS workstations connected by a 10 Mbps Ethernet. For certain user patterns, we show that our parallelization exhibits substantial speedups. We compare the performance of a dynamic and a static load balancing algorithm