Parallel rendering techniques for massively parallel visualization

As the resolution of simulation models increases, scientific visualization algorithms which take advantage of the large memory. and parallelism of Massively Parallel Processors (MPPs) are becoming increasingly important. For large applications rendering on the MPP tends to be preferable to rendering on a graphics workstation due to the MPP`s abundant resources: memory, disk, and numerous processors. The challenge becomes developing algorithms that can exploit these resources while minimizing overhead, typically communication costs. This paper will describe recent efforts in parallel rendering for polygonal primitives as well as parallel volumetric techniques. This paper presents rendering algorithms, developed for massively parallel processors (MPPs), for polygonal, spheres, and volumetric data. The polygon algorithm uses a data parallel approach whereas the sphere and volume render use a MIMD approach. Implementations for these algorithms are presented for the Thinking Ma.chines Corporation CM-5 MPP