Adaptive decomposition and remapping algorithms for object-space-parallel direct volume rendering of unstructured grids
Object space (OS) parallelization of an efficient direct volume rendering algorithm for unstructured grids on distributed-memory architectures is investigated. The adaptive OS decomposition problem is modeled as a graph partitioning (GP) problem using an efficient and highly accurate estimation scheme for view-dependent node and edge weighting. In the proposed model, minimizing the cutsize corresponds to minimizing the parallelization overhead due to the data communication and redundant computation/storage while maintaining the GP balance constraint corresponds to maintaining the computational load balance in parallel rendering. A GP-based, view-independent cell clustering scheme is introduced to induce more tractable view-dependent computational graphs for successive visualizations. As another contribution, a graph-theoretical remapping model is proposed as a solution to the general remapping problem and is used in minimization of the cell-data migration overhead. The remapping tool RM-MeTiS is developed by modifying the GP tool MeTiS and is used in partitioning the remapping graphs. Experiments are conducted using benchmark datasets on a 28-node PC cluster to evaluate the performance of the proposed models. (C) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
adaptive decomposition remapping direct volume rendering unstructured grids graph partitioning object space parallelization