Image-space-parallel direct volume rendering on a cluster of PCs

An image-space-parallel, ray-casting-based direct volume rendering algorithm is developed for rendering of unstructured data grids on distributed-memory parallel architectures. For efficiency in screen workload calculations, a graph-partitioning-based tetrahedral cell clustering technique is used. The main contribution of the work is at the proposed model, which formulates the screen partitioning problem as a hypergraph partitioning problem. It is experimentally verified on a PC cluster that, compared to the previously suggested jagged partitioning approach, the proposed approach results in both better load balancing in local rendering and less communication overhead in data migration phases. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.