TetSplat: Real-time Rendering and Volume Clipping of Large Unstructured Tetrahedral Meshes

We present a novel approach to interactive visualization and exploration of large unstructured tetrahedral meshes. These massive 3D meshes are used in mission-critical CFD and structural mechanics simulations, and typically sample multiple field values on several millions of unstructured grid points. Our method relies on the pre-processing of the tetrahedral mesh to partition it into non-convex boundaries and internal fragments that are subsequently encoded into compressed multi-resolution data representations. These compact hierarchical data structures are then adaptively rendered and probed in real-time on a commodity PC. Our point-based rendering algorithm, which is inspired by QSplat, employs a simple but highly efficient splatting technique that guarantees interactive frame-rates regardless of the size of the input mesh and the available rendering hardware. It furthermore allows for real-time probing of the volumetric data-set through constructive solid geometry operations as well as interactive editing of color transfer functions for an arbitrary number of field values. Thus, the presented visualization technique allows end-users for the first time to interactively render and explore very large unstructured tetrahedral meshes on relatively inexpensive hardware

The combination of spatial access methods and computational geometry in geographic database systems

Geographic database systems, known as geographic information systems (GISs) particularly among non-computer scientists, are one of the most important applications of the very active research area named spatial database systems. Consequently following the database approach, a GIS hag to be seamless, i.e. store the complete area of interest (e.g. the whole world) in one database map. For exhibiting acceptable performance a seamless GIS hag to use spatial access methods. Due to the complexity of query and analysis operations on geographic objects, state-of-the-art computational geomeny concepts have to be used in implementing these operations. In this paper, we present GIS operations based on the compuational geomeny technique plane sweep. Specifically, we show how the two ingredients spatial access methods and computational geomeny concepts can be combined für improving the performance of GIS operations. The fruitfulness of this combination is based on the fact that spatial access methods efficiently provide the data at the time when computational geomeny algorithms need it für processing. Additionally, this combination avoids page faults and facilitates the parallelization of the algorithms.

A storage and access architecture for efficient query processing in spatial database systems

Due to the high complexity of objects and queries and also due to extremely large data volumes, geographic database systems impose stringent requirements on their storage and access architecture with respect to efficient query processing. Performance improving concepts such as spatial storage and access structures, approximations, object decompositions and multi-phase query processing have been suggested and analyzed as single building blocks. In this paper, we describe a storage and access architecture which is composed from the above building blocks in a modular fashion. Additionally, we incorporate into our architecture a new ingredient, the scene organization, for efficiently supporting set-oriented access of large-area region queries. An experimental performance comparison demonstrates that the concept of scene organization leads to considerable performance improvements for large-area region queries by a factor of up to 150

Efficient Parallel and Distributed Algorithms for GIS Polygon Overlay Processing

Polygon clipping is one of the complex operations in computational geometry. It is used in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Computer Graphics, and VLSI CAD. For two polygons with n and m vertices, the number of intersections can be O(nm). In this dissertation, we present the first output-sensitive CREW PRAM algorithm, which can perform polygon clipping in O(log n) time using O(n + k + k\u27) processors, where n is the number of vertices, k is the number of intersections, and k\u27 is the additional temporary vertices introduced due to the partitioning of polygons. The current best algorithm by Karinthi, Srinivas, and Almasi does not handle self-intersecting polygons, is not output-sensitive and must employ O(n^2) processors to achieve O(log n) time. The second parallel algorithm is an output-sensitive PRAM algorithm based on Greiner-Hormann algorithm with O(log n) time complexity using O(n + k) processors. This is cost-optimal when compared to the time complexity of the best-known sequential plane-sweep based algorithm for polygon clipping. For self-intersecting polygons, the time complexity is O(((n + k) log n log log n)/p) using p In addition to these parallel algorithms, the other main contributions in this dissertation are 1) multi-core and many-core implementation for clipping a pair of polygons and 2) MPI-GIS and Hadoop Topology Suite for distributed polygon overlay using a cluster of nodes. Nvidia GPU and CUDA are used for the many-core implementation. The MPI based system achieves 44X speedup while processing about 600K polygons in two real-world GIS shapefiles 1) USA Detailed Water Bodies and 2) USA Block Group Boundaries) within 20 seconds on a 32-node (8 cores each) IBM iDataPlex cluster interconnected by InfiniBand technology

Faster data structures and graphics hardware techniques for high performance rendering

Computer generated imagery is used in a wide range of disciplines, each with different requirements. As an example, real-time applications such as computer games have completely different restrictions and demands than offline rendering of feature films. A game has to render quickly using only limited resources, yet present visually adequate images. Film and visual effects rendering may not have strict time requirements but are still required to render efficiently utilizing huge render systems with hundreds or even thousands of CPU cores. In real-time rendering, with limited time and hardware resources, it is always important to produce as high rendering quality as possible given the constraints available. The first paper in this thesis presents an analytical hardware model together with a feed-back system that guarantees the highest level of image quality subject to a limited time budget. As graphics processing units grow more powerful, power consumption becomes a critical issue. Smaller handheld devices have only a limited source of energy, their battery, and both small devices and high-end hardware are required to minimize energy consumption not to overheat. The second paper presents experiments and analysis which consider power usage across a range of real-time rendering algorithms and shadow algorithms executed on high-end, integrated and handheld hardware. Computing accurate reflections and refractions effects has long been considered available only in offline rendering where time isn’t a constraint. The third paper presents a hybrid approach, utilizing the speed of real-time rendering algorithms and hardware with the quality of offline methods to render high quality reflections and refractions in real-time. The fourth and fifth paper present improvements in construction time and quality of Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVH). Building BVHs faster reduces rendering time in offline rendering and brings ray tracing a step closer towards a feasible real-time approach. Bonsai, presented in the fourth paper, constructs BVHs on CPUs faster than contemporary competing algorithms and produces BVHs of a very high quality. Following Bonsai, the fifth paper presents an algorithm that refines BVH construction by allowing triangles to be split. Although splitting triangles increases construction time, it generally allows for higher quality BVHs. The fifth paper introduces a triangle splitting BVH construction approach that builds BVHs with quality on a par with an earlier high quality splitting algorithm. However, the method presented in paper five is several times faster in construction time

OpenACC Based GPU Parallelization of Plane Sweep Algorithm for Geometric Intersection

Line segment intersection is one of the elementary operations in computational geometry. Complex problems in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) like finding map overlays or spatial joins using polygonal data require solving segment intersections. Plane sweep paradigm is used for finding geometric intersection in an efficient manner. However, it is difficult to parallelize due to its in-order processing of spatial events. We present a new fine-grained parallel algorithm for geometric intersection and its CPU and GPU implementation using OpenMP and OpenACC. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating an effective parallelization of plane sweep on GPUs. We chose compiler directive based approach for implementation because of its simplicity to parallelize sequential code. Using Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU, our implementation achieves around 40X speedup for line segment intersection problem on 40K and 80K data sets compared to sequential CGAL library

Machine Learning of Scientific Events: Classification, Detection, and Verification

Classification and segmentation of objects using machine learning algorithms have been widely used in a large variety of scientific domains in the past few decades. With the exponential growth in the number of ground-based, air-borne, and space-borne observatories, Heliophysics has been taking full advantage of such algorithms in many automated tasks, and obtained valuable knowledge by detecting solar events and analyzing the big-picture patterns. Despite the fact that in many cases, the strengths of the general-purpose algorithms seem to be transferable to problems of scientific domains where scientific events are of interest, in practice there are some critical issues which I address in this dissertation. First, I discuss the four main categories of such issues and then in the proceeding chapters I present real-world examples and the different approaches I take for tackling them. In Chapter II, I take a classical path for classification of three solar events; Active Regions, Coronal Holes, and Quiet Suns. I optimize a set of ten image parameters and improve the classification performance by up to 36%. In Chapter III, in contrast, I utilize an automated feature extraction algorithm, i.e., a deep neural network, for detection and segmentation of another solar event, namely solar Filaments. Using an off-the-shelf algorithm, I overcome several of the issues of the existing detection module, while facing an important challenge; lack of an appropriate evaluation metric for verification of the segmentations. In Chapter IV, I introduce a novel metric to provide a more accurate verification especially for salient objects with fine structures. This metric, called Multi-Scale Intersection over Union (MIoU), is a fusion of two concepts; fractal dimension from Geometry, and Intersection over Union (IoU) which is a popular metric for segmentation verification. Through several experiments I examine the advantages of using MIoU over IoU, and I conclude this chapter by a follow-through on the segmentation results of the previously implemented filament detection module