Authors:
Daisuke Nagayasu
;
Fumihiko Ino
and
Kenichi Hagihara
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, Japan
Keyword(s):
Volume rendering, time-varying data, pipelined rendering, data compression, GPU, COTS.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Parallel Rendering
;
Real-Time Rendering
;
Rendering
;
Systems and Software Architectures for Rendering
;
Volume Rendering
Abstract:
This paper presents performance results of an out-of-core renderer, aiming at investigating the possibility of real-time rendering of time-varying scalar volume data using a single commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) computer. Our renderer is accelerated using software techniques such as data compression methods and thread-based pipeline mechanisms. These techniques are efficiently implemented on a COTS computer that combines multiple GPUs, CPUs, and storage devices using scalable link interface (SLI), multi-core, and redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID) technologies, respectively. We find that the COTS-based out-of-core renderer achieves a video rate of 35 frames per second (fps) for 258 × 258 × 208 voxel data with 99 time steps. It also demonstrates an almost interactive rate of 4 fps for 512 × 512 × 295 voxel data with 411 time steps.