New parallel volume rendering based on Shear-Wrap using a pipeline framework

In distributed computing environment, an important factor affecting performance of parallel algorithm is communication bandwidth. A new parallel volume rendering algorithm is presented in this paper, based on Shear-Wrap factorization of the viewing transformation using pipeline framework of PCs. Taking full use of overlap of communication and computing, we overcome the bottleneck of communication. In the existing algorithms based on object partition, local rendering and image composition are divided into two serial processes. Communication hardly happens during local rendering. In the period of image compositing, however, communication is very busy, and even congested. Furthermore, there are a big synchronism overhead in this period. This paper well solves this drawback by making local rendering and image compositing concurrently through pipeline of PCs. We have experimented on a pipeline composing of 16 Pentiums. The results shows that, performance is not affected much by communication and system overhead is little compared to rendering time. This paper provides a new method for studying on low-price, high-efficiency and real-time volume rendering system.