Extensions to permutation warping for parallel volume rendering

Abstract

Biomedical volume visualization requires high quality and high performance, but the existing high performance solutions such as the Shear Warp algorithm, 3D texture mapping, and special purpose hardware have problems. Permutation warping achieves high fidelity for biomedical datasets of regular rectilinear volumes, using a one-to-one communication scheme for optimal O(1) communication on massively parallel computers. Extensions are presented including data dependent optimizations using octrees, arbitrary view angle flexibility, and multiple instruction stream multiple data stream (MIMD) implementation. A MasPar MP-2, single instruction stream multiple data stream (SIMD) (16,384 processor), implementation achieves 14 frames/s, using trilinear reconstruction on 128 3 volumes for 400% runtime improvement over our previous result. A Proteus MIMD (32 processor) implementation achieves 1 frame/s on the same data. Additionally the PermWeb software architecture is presented, that has been shown as a proof of concept means to provide wide shared access to a powerful centralized renderer. All of these improvements make permutation warping an effective solution for biomedial volume visualization.