Design Of A High Performance Volume Visualization System

Abstract

Visualizing three dimensional discrete datasets has been a topic of many research projects and papers in the past decade. We discuss the issues that come up when designing a whole computer system capable of visualizing these datasets in real time. We explain the three way chicken and egg problem and discuss Hewlett- Packard s effort at breaking it with the Voxelator API extensions to OpenGL. We enumerate what a good hardware design should accomplish. We discuss what system issues are important and show how to integrate volume visualization hardware in one of Hewlett-Packard s graphics accelerators, the VISUALIZE-48XP. We show why the Voxelator is an efficient and well designed API by explaining how various existing hardware engines will easily fit into the Voxelator framework.