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 2563, parallel processing is imperative. In this paper, we present an O(log n) EREW algorithm for volume rendering. We use O(n3) processors that can be optimized to O (log3 n) time with O(n3/log3n) processors. We have implemented our algorithm on a Mas Par MP-1. The implementation results show that a frame of size 2563 is generated in 11 s by 4096 processors. This time can be further reduced by the use of large number of processors