Title
Irregular Grid Raycasting Implementation on the Cell Broadband Engine
Abstract
Direct volume rendering has become a popular technique for visualizing volumetric data from sources such as scientific simulations, analytic functions, medical scanners, among others. Volume rendering algorithms, such as raycasting, can produce high-quality images, however, the use of raycasting has been limited due to its high demands on computational power and memory bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a new implementation of the raycasting algorithm that takes advantage of the highly parallel architecture of the Cell Broadband Engine processor, with 9 heterogeneous cores, in order to allow efficient raycasting of irregular datasets. All the computational power of the Cell~BE processor, though, comes at the cost of a different programming model. Applications need to be rewritten, which requires using multithreading and vectorized code. In our approach, we tackle this problem by distributing ray computations using the visible faces, and vectorizing the lighting integral operations inside each core. Our experimental results show that we can obtain good speedups reducing the overall rendering time significantly.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2009.15
SBAC-PAD
Keywords
Field
DocType
overall rendering time,efficient raycasting,different programming model,analytic function,cell broadband engine processor,volume rendering algorithm,direct volume rendering,raycasting algorithm,computational power,irregular grid raycasting implementation,programming model,data structures,pixel,raycasting,memory management,volume rendering,grid computing,memory bandwidth,analytic functions,ray tracing,multithreading,data visualisation,programming,parallel rendering
Data structure,Multithreading,Parallel rendering,Volume rendering,Memory bandwidth,Programming paradigm,Computer science,Parallel computing,Memory management,Rendering (computer graphics)
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1550-6533
978-0-7695-3857-0
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
16
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guilherme Cox1373.85
A. Maximo2878.10
Cristiana Bentes36017.06
Ricardo C. Farias413614.74