5,913 research outputs found
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Ray Casting Architectures for Volume Visualization
Real-time visualization of large volume datasets demands high performance computation, pushing the storage, processing, and data communication requirements to the limits of current technology. General purpose parallel processors have been used to visualize moderate size datasets at interactive frame rates; however, the cost and size of these supercomputers inhibits the widespread use for real-time visualization. This paper surveys several special purpose architectures that seek to render volumes at interactive rates. These specialized visualization accelerators have cost, performance, and size advantages over parallel processors. All architectures implement ray casting using parallel and pipelined hardware. We introduce a new metric that normalizes performance to compare these architectures. The architectures included in this survey are VOGUE, VIRIM, Array Based Ray Casting, EM-Cube, and VIZARD II. We also discuss future applications of special purpose accelerators.Engineering and Applied Science
A Distributed GPU-based Framework for real-time 3D Volume Rendering of Large Astronomical Data Cubes
We present a framework to interactively volume-render three-dimensional data
cubes using distributed ray-casting and volume bricking over a cluster of
workstations powered by one or more graphics processing units (GPUs) and a
multi-core CPU. The main design target for this framework is to provide an
in-core visualization solution able to provide three-dimensional interactive
views of terabyte-sized data cubes. We tested the presented framework using a
computing cluster comprising 64 nodes with a total of 128 GPUs. The framework
proved to be scalable to render a 204 GB data cube with an average of 30 frames
per second. Our performance analyses also compare between using NVIDIA Tesla
1060 and 2050 GPU architectures and the effect of increasing the visualization
output resolution on the rendering performance. Although our initial focus, and
the examples presented in this work, is volume rendering of spectral data cubes
from radio astronomy, we contend that our approach has applicability to other
disciplines where close to real-time volume rendering of terabyte-order 3D data
sets is a requirement.Comment: 13 Pages, 7 figures, has been accepted for publication in
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australi
Interactive Visualization of the Largest Radioastronomy Cubes
3D visualization is an important data analysis and knowledge discovery tool,
however, interactive visualization of large 3D astronomical datasets poses a
challenge for many existing data visualization packages. We present a solution
to interactively visualize larger-than-memory 3D astronomical data cubes by
utilizing a heterogeneous cluster of CPUs and GPUs. The system partitions the
data volume into smaller sub-volumes that are distributed over the rendering
workstations. A GPU-based ray casting volume rendering is performed to generate
images for each sub-volume, which are composited to generate the whole volume
output, and returned to the user. Datasets including the HI Parkes All Sky
Survey (HIPASS - 12 GB) southern sky and the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS - 26
GB) data cubes were used to demonstrate our framework's performance. The
framework can render the GASS data cube with a maximum render time < 0.3 second
with 1024 x 1024 pixels output resolution using 3 rendering workstations and 8
GPUs. Our framework will scale to visualize larger datasets, even of Terabyte
order, if proper hardware infrastructure is available.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, Accepted New Astronomy July 201
Three architectures for volume rendering
Volume rendering is a key technique in scientific visualization that lends itself to significant exploitable parallelism. The high computational demands of real-time volume rendering and continued technological advances in the area of VLSI give impetus to the development of special-purpose volume rendering architectures. This paper presents and characterizes three recently developed volume rendering engines which are based on the ray-casting method. A taxonomy of the algorithmic variants of ray-casting and details of each ray-casting architecture are discussed. The paper then compares the machine features and provides an outlook on future developments in the area of volume rendering hardware
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Architectures for Real-Time Volume Rendering
Over the last decade, volume rendering has become an invaluable visualization technique for a wide variety of applications. This paper reviews three special-purpose architectures for interactive volume rendering: texture mapping, VIRIM, and VolumePro. Commercial implementations of these architectures are available or underway. The discussion of each architecture will focus on the algorithm, system architecture, memory system, and volume rendering performance.Engineering and Applied Science
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Towards a Scalable Architecture for Real-Time Volume Rendering
In this paper we present our research eff orts towards a
scalable volume rendering architecture for the real-time
visualization of dynamically changing high-resolution
datasets. Using a linearly skewed memory interleaving we were able to develop a parallel data
ow model
that leads to local, fixed-bandwidth interconnections between processing elements. This parallel dataflow model
diff ers from previous work in that it requires no global
communication of data except at the pixel level. Using this data
ow model we are developing Cube-4, an
architecture that is scalable to very high performances
and allows for modular and extensible hardware implementations.Engineering and Applied Science
Volumetric Isosurface Rendering with Deep Learning-Based Super-Resolution
Rendering an accurate image of an isosurface in a volumetric field typically
requires large numbers of data samples. Reducing the number of required samples
lies at the core of research in volume rendering. With the advent of deep
learning networks, a number of architectures have been proposed recently to
infer missing samples in multi-dimensional fields, for applications such as
image super-resolution and scan completion. In this paper, we investigate the
use of such architectures for learning the upscaling of a low-resolution
sampling of an isosurface to a higher resolution, with high fidelity
reconstruction of spatial detail and shading. We introduce a fully
convolutional neural network, to learn a latent representation generating a
smooth, edge-aware normal field and ambient occlusions from a low-resolution
normal and depth field. By adding a frame-to-frame motion loss into the
learning stage, the upscaling can consider temporal variations and achieves
improved frame-to-frame coherence. We demonstrate the quality of the network
for isosurfaces which were never seen during training, and discuss remote and
in-situ visualization as well as focus+context visualization as potential
application
Feed-forward volume rendering algorithm for moderately parallel MIMD machines
Algorithms for direct volume rendering on parallel and vector processors are investigated. Volumes are transformed efficiently on parallel processors by dividing the data into slices and beams of voxels. Equal sized sets of slices along one axis are distributed to processors. Parallelism is achieved at two levels. Because each slice can be transformed independently of others, processors transform their assigned slices with no communication, thus providing maximum possible parallelism at the first level. Within each slice, consecutive beams are incrementally transformed using coherency in the transformation computation. Also, coherency across slices can be exploited to further enhance performance. This coherency yields the second level of parallelism through the use of the vector processing or pipelining. Other ongoing efforts include investigations into image reconstruction techniques, load balancing strategies, and improving performance
Mobile graphics: SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 course
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