Volume Rendering: Out-of-core Algorithms and Parallel Rendering

Rendering volumetric data, as a compute/communication intensive and highly parallel application, represents the characteristics of future workloads for desktop computers. Interactively rendering volumetric data has been a challenging problem due to its high computational and communication requirements. While the new multi- core architecture trend in PC provides new opportunities, widespread use of those parallel processors requires extensive changes in previous algorithms to take advantage of the new architectures. In this book, new methods and techniques to support efficient rendering of large volumetric data are presented. A disk data layout and an out-of-core indexing structure for efficient out-of- core volume rendering are first presented. Then a streaming model for efficiently implementing volume rendering on a heterogeneous multi-core processor environment is introduced with the implementation detail of the model on SONY/TOSHIBA/IBM Cell Broadband Engine and on NVIDIA CUDA architecture. This book should be useful to anyone who is interested in efficient volume rendering especially using the recent multi- core architectures.