MovieMaker: A Parallel Movie-Making Software for Large Scale Simulations

We have developed a parallel rendering software for scientific visualization of large-scale, three-dimensional, time development simulations. The goal of this software, MovieMaker, is to generate a movie, or a series of visualization images from totally one TB-scale data within one night (or less than 12 hours). The isocontouring, volume rendering, and streamlines are implemented. MovieMaker is a parallel program for the shared memory architecture with dynamic load balancing and overlapped disk I/O.Comment: 3pages, 5figures, submitted to J. Plasma Physcs (special issue for 19th ICNSP

An anti-aliasing method for parallel rendering

We describe a parallel rendering method based on the adaptive supersampling technique to produce anti-aliased images with minimal memory consumption. Unlike traditional supersampling methods, this one does not supersample every pixel, but only those edge pixels. We consider various strategies to reduce the memory consumption in order for the method to be applicable in situations where limited or fixed amount of pre-allocated memory is available. This is a very important issue, especially in parallel rendering. We have implemented our algorithm on a parallel machine based on the message passing model. Towards the end of the paper, we present some experimental results on the memory usage and the performance of the method.published_or_final_versio

Fast data parallel polygon rendering

Journal ArticleThis paper describes a data parallel method for polygon rendering on a massively parallel machine. This method, based on a simple shading model, is targeted for applications which require very fast rendering for extremely large sets of polygons. Such sets are found in many scienti c visualization applications. The renderer can handle arbitrarily complex polygons which need not be meshed. Issues involving load balancing are addressed and a data parallel load balancing algorithm is presented. The rendering and load balancing algorithms are implemented on both the CM-200 and the CM-5. Experimental results are presented. This rendering toolkit enables a scientist to display 3D shaded polygons directly from a parallel machine avoiding the transmission of huge amounts of data to a post-processing rendering system

A survey of techniques and technologies for web-based real-time interactive rendering

When exploring a virtual environment, realism depends mainly on two factors: realistic images and real-time feedback (motions, behaviour etc.). In this context, photo realism and physical validity of computer generated images required by emerging applications, such as advanced e-commerce, still impose major challenges in the area of rendering research whereas the complexity of lighting phenomena further requires powerful and predictable computing if time constraints must be attained. In this technical report we address the state-of-the-art on rendering, trying to put the focus on approaches, techniques and technologies that might enable real-time interactive web-based clientserver rendering systems. The focus is on the end-systems and not the networking technologies used to interconnect client(s) and server(s).Siemens; Bertelsmann mediaSystems GmbH; Eptron Multimedia; Instituto Politécnico do Porto - ISEP-IPP; Institute Laboratory for Mixed Realities at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, LMR; Mälardalen Real-Time Research Centre (MRTC) at Mälardalen University in Västerås; Q-Systems

A parallel rendering approach to the adaptive supersampling method

Original z-buffer method is a very efficient method for image generation. The limitation is that it introduces aliases into the output image. Although many methods have been proposed to address this problem. Most of them suffer from requiring a large memory space, demanding for high computational power, or having some other limitations. Recently, we presented a simple anti-aliasing method based on the supersampling method. Instead of supersampling every pixel, we supersample edge pixels only. In this paper, we discuss various approaches for parallelizing the method and their effects on memory usage and performance.published_or_final_versio

Recent developments in parallel rendering

Journal ArticleUsing parallel computers for computer graphics rendering dates back to the late 1970s. Several papers published then focused on image space decompositions for theoretical parallel machines. Early research concentrated on algorithmic studies and special-purpose hardware, but the growing availability of commercial parallel systems added a new dimension to parallel rendering

Scalable Real-Time Rendering for Extremely Complex 3D Environments Using Multiple GPUs

In 3D visualization, real-time rendering of high-quality meshes in complex 3D environments is still one of the major challenges in computer graphics. New data acquisition techniques like 3D modeling and scanning have drastically increased the requirement for more complex models and the demand for higher display resolutions in recent years. Most of the existing acceleration techniques using a single GPU for rendering suffer from the limited GPU memory budget, the time-consuming sequential executions, and the finite display resolution. Recently, people have started building commodity workstations with multiple GPUs and multiple displays. As a result, more GPU memory is available across a distributed cluster of GPUs, more computational power is provided throughout the combination of multiple GPUs, and a higher display resolution can be achieved by connecting each GPU to a display monitor (resulting in a tiled large display configuration). However, using a multi-GPU workstation may not always give the desired rendering performance due to the imbalanced rendering workloads among GPUs and overheads caused by inter-GPU communication. In this dissertation, I contribute a multi-GPU multi-display parallel rendering approach for complex 3D environments. The approach has the capability to support a high-performance and high-quality rendering of static and dynamic 3D environments. A novel parallel load balancing algorithm is developed based on a screen partitioning strategy to dynamically balance the number of vertices and triangles rendered by each GPU. The overhead of inter-GPU communication is minimized by transferring only a small amount of image pixels rather than chunks of 3D primitives with a novel frame exchanging algorithm. The state-of-the-art parallel mesh simplification and GPU out-of-core techniques are integrated into the multi-GPU multi-display system to accelerate the rendering process