Scalable interactive volume rendering using off-the-shelf components

Describes an application of a second generation implementation of the Sepia architecture (Sepia-2) to interactive volumetric visualization of large rectilinear scalar fields. By employing pipelined associative blending operators in a sort-last configuration a demonstration system with 8 rendering computers sustains 24 to 28 frames per second while interactively rendering large data volumes (1024/spl times/256/spl times/256 voxels, and 512/spl times/512/spl times/512 voxels). We believe interactive performance at these frame rates and data sizes is unprecedented. We also believe these results can be extended to other types of structured and unstructured grids and a variety of GL rendering techniques including surface rendering and shadow mapping. We show how to extend our single-stage crossbar demonstration system to multi-stage networks in order to support much larger data sizes and higher image resolutions. This requires solving a dynamic mapping problem for a class of blending operators that includes Porter-Duff compositing operators.

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