Efficient Compositing Methods for the Sort-Last-Sparse Parallel Volume Rendering System on Distributed Memory Multicomputers

  • Authors:

  • Don-Lin Yang;Jen-Chih Yu;Yeh-Ching Chung

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information Engineering, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan 407 dlyang@fcu.edu.tw;Department of Information Engineering, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan 407 jcyu@fcu.edu.tw;Department of Information Engineering, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan 407 ychung@fcu.edu.tw

  • Venue:
  • The Journal of Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

In the sort-last-sparse parallel volume rendering system on distributed memory multicomputers, one can achieve a very good performance improvement in the rendering phase by increasing the number of processors. This is because each processor can render images locally without communicating with other processors. However, in the compositing phase, a processor has to exchange local images with other processors. When the number of processors exceeds a threshold, the image compositing time becomes a bottleneck. In this paper, we propose three compositing methods to efficiently reduce the compositing time in parallel volume rendering. They are the binary-swap with bounding rectangle (BSBR) method, the binary-swap with run-length encoding and static load-balancing (BSLC) method, and the binary-swap with bounding rectangle and run-length encoding (BSBRC) method. The proposed methods were implemented on an SP2 parallel machine along with the binary-swap compositing method. The experimental results show that the BSBRC method has the best performance among these four methods.