Supercomputing power for interactive visualization. Progress report, Oct 90-Mar 91

The authors work over the past several years has explored multicomputer architectures for three dimensional graphics that offer the promise of scalability, very high performance, and greater flexibility and range of application than today's systems. While current high performance commercial graphics systems employ various forms of parallelism to support interaction with 3D objects and scenes, all operate on a single stream of graphics primitives. Much of our effort has been devoted to finding ways to operate in parallel both on lists of graphics primitives as well as on the pixels within primitives, and to incorporate parallel execution of user application code to generate and modify the graphics primitives to be displayed.