Towards a Scalable Architecture for Real-Time Volume Rendering

Abstract

In this paper we present our research efforts towards a scalable volume rendering architecture for the real-time visualization of dynamically changing high-resolution datasets. Using a linearly skewed memory interleav­ ing we were able to develop a parallel dataflow model that leads to local, fixed-bandwidth interconnections be­ tween processing elements. This parallel dataflow model differs from previous work in that it requires no global communication of data except at the pixel level. Us­ ing this dataflow model we are developing Cube-4, an architecture that is scalable to very high performances and allows for modular and extensible hardware imple­ mentations.