Distributed parallel volume rendering on shared memory systems

Abstract

This paper reports on the remote use of MIMD parallel machines for compute-intensive visualisation tasks. As an alternative to dedicated rendering hardware, a system using conventional desktop machines connected to a visualisation server permits sharing of the resource between several users, and/or sites. The design of a parallel rendering system should consider not only how to achieve efficient parallel performance, but how to minimise response time, that is, the time taken from the specification of the viewing parameters to the display of the completed image. Progressive refinement and latency hiding techniques are proposed as a method of reducing the latency of a distributed rendering system. In distributed rendering, integrating the transmission of the image with the rendering process allows the latency introduced by the network to be hidden. Timing data are presented demonstrating the scalability of the parallel algorithm and its interactive use over LAN networks.