An efficient and scalable parallel algorithm for out-of-core isosurface extraction and rendering

Abstract

We consider the problem of isosurface extraction and rendering for large scale time varying data. Such datasets have been appearing at an increasing rate especially from physics-based simulations, and can range in size from hundreds of gigabytes to tens of terabytes. We develop a new simple indexing scheme, which makes use of the concepts of the interval tree and the span space data structures. The new scheme enables isosurface extraction and rendering in I/O optimal time, using more compact indexing structure and more effective bulk data movement than the previous schemes. Moreover, our indexing scheme can be easily extended to a multiprocessor environment in which each processor has access to its own local disk. The resulting parallel algorithm is provably efficient and scalable. That is, it achieves load balancing across the processors independent of the isovalue, with almost no overhead in the total amount of work relative to the sequential algorithm. We conduct a large number of experimental tests on the University of Maryland Visualization Cluster using the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability dataset, and obtain results that consistently validate the efficiency and the scalability of our algorithm.