On-Site Volume Rendering with GPU-Enabled Devices

Abstract

Now that high-performance computing systems can rely more on a cloud based infrastructure, it becomes much more important to have ubiquitous data processing and visualization capability. This will allow data sharing among numerous clients using shared data repositories through a secure web server. Thanks to the wide availability of GPU support in today's mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets, as well as the recently published WebGL standard, pervasive computing for high-quality and real-time volume rendering may be realized on such high-performance platforms. We have invented two high-performance volume renderers, namely, single-pass GPU ray caster and fast 3D texture slicer, for both mobile and desktop platforms. Rigorous experiments and performance assessments reveal that the proposed mobile 3D image rendering system outperforms the existing approaches in the literature.