Streaming Model Based Volume Ray Casting Implementation for Cell Broadband Engine

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an experimental study of an inexpensive off-the-shelf sort-last volume visualization architecture based upon multiple GPUs and a single CPU. We show how to efficiently make use of this architecture to achieve high performance sort-last volume visualization of large datasets. We analyze the bottlenecks of this architecture.We compare this architecture to a classical sort-last visualization system using a cluster of commodity machines interconnected by a gigabit Ethernet network. Based on extensive experiments, we show that this solution competes very well with a mid-sized PC cluster, while it significantly improves performance compared to a single standard PC.