I/O-Conscious Volume Rendering

Yang, Chuan-Kai; Chiueh, Tzi-cker

I/O-Conscious Volume Rendering

Files

263-272.pdf (100.12 KB)

Date

2001

Authors

Yang, Chuan-Kai
Chiueh, Tzi-cker

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

Most existing volume rendering algorithms assume that data sets are memory-resident and thus ignore the performance overhead of disk I/O. While this assumption may be true for high-performance graphics machines, it does not hold for most desktop personal workstations. To minimize the end-to-end volume rendering time, this work re-examines implementation strategies of the ray casting algorithm, taking into account both computation and I/O overheads. Specifically, we developed a data-driven execution model for ray casting that achieves the maximum overlap between rendering computation and disk I/O. Together with other performance optimizations, on a 300-MHz Pentium-II machine, without directional shading, our implementation is able to render a 128x128 greyscale image from a 128x128x128 data set with an average end-to-end delay of 1 second, which is very close to the memory-resident rendering time. With a little modification, this work can also be extended to do out-of-core visualization as well.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/VisSym/VisSym01/263-272
,
booktitle = {Eurographics / IEEE VGTC Symposium on Visualization
},
editor = {David S. Ebert and Jean M. Favre and Ronald Peikert
},
title = {{I/O-Conscious Volume Rendering
}},
author = {Yang, Chuan-Kai and 
Chiueh, Tzi-cker
},
year = {2001
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-5296
},
ISBN = {3-211-83674-8
},
DOI = {/10.2312/VisSym/VisSym01/263-272
}
}