Case study of multithreaded in-core isosurface extraction algorithms
EG PGV'04 Proceedings of the 5th Eurographics conference on Parallel Graphics and Visualization
Triangulating molecular surfaces on multiple GPUs
Proceedings of the 20th European MPI Users' Group Meeting
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We present in-core and out-of-core parallel techniques for implementing isosurface rendering based on the notion of span-space buckets. Our in-core technique makes conservative use of the RAM and is amenable to parallelization. The out-of-core variant keeps the amount of data read in the search process to a minimum, visiting only the cells that intersect the isosurface. The out-of-core technique additionally minimizes disk I/O time through in-order seeking, interleaving data records on the disk and by overlapping computational and I/O threads. The overall isosurface rendering time achieved using our out-of-core span space buckets is comparable to that of well-optimized in-core techniques that have enough RAM at their disposal to avoid thrashing. When the RAM size is limited, our out-of-core span-space buckets maintains its performance level while in-core algorithms either start to thrash or mustsacrifice performance for a smaller memory footprint.