Parallel Texture-Based Vector Field Visualization on Curved Surfaces Using GPU Cluster Computers
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Date
2006
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
We adopt a technique for texture-based visualization of flow fields on curved surfaces for parallel computation on a GPU cluster. The underlying LIC method relies on image-space calculations and allows the user to visualize a full 3D vector field on arbitrary and changing hypersurfaces. By using parallelization, both the visualization speed and the maximum data set size are scaled with the number of cluster nodes. A sort-first strategy with image-space decomposition is employed to distribute the workload for the LIC computation, while a sort-last approach with an object-space partitioning of the vector field is used to increase the total amount of available GPU memory. We specifically address issues for parallel GPU-based vector field visualization, such as reduced locality of memory accesses caused by particle tracing, dynamic load balancing for changing camera parameters, and the combination of image-space and object-space decomposition in a hybrid approach. Performance measurements document the behavior of our implementation on a GPU cluster with AMD Opteron CPUs, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra GPUs, and Infiniband network connection.
Description
@inproceedings{10.2312:EGPGV/EGPGV06/075-082,
booktitle = {Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization},
editor = {Alan Heirich and Bruno Raffin and Luis Paulo dos Santos},
title = {{Parallel Texture-Based Vector Field Visualization on Curved Surfaces Using GPU Cluster Computers}},
author = {Bachthaler, S. and Strengert, M. and Weiskopf, D. and Ertl, T.},
year = {2006},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-348X},
ISBN = {3-905673-40-1},
DOI = {10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV06/075-082}
}