Efficient compositing methods for the sort-last-sparse parallel volume rendering system on distributed memory multicomputers

Abstract

In the sort-last-sparse parallel volume rendering system on distributed memory multicomputers, as the number of processors increases, in the rendering phase, we can get a good speedup because each processor renders 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 is over a threshold, the image compositing time becomes a bottleneck. In this paper, we proposed three compositing methods, the binary-swap with bounding rectangle method, the binary-swap with run-length encoding and static load-balancing method, and the binary-swap with bounding rectangle and run-length encoding method, to efficiently reduce the compositing time in the sort-last-sparse parallel volume rendering system on distributed memory multicomputers. The proposed methods were implemented on an SP2 parallel machine along with the binary-swap compositing method. The experimental results show that the binary-swap with bounding rectangle and run-length encoding method has the best performance among the four methods.