A Task-Based Parallel Rendering Component For Large-Scale Visualization Applications

Abstract

An increasingly heterogeneous system landscape in modern high performance computing requires the efficient and portable adaption of performant algorithms to diverse architectures. However, classic hybrid shared-memory/distributed systems are designed and tuned towards specific platforms, thus impeding development, usage and optimization of these approaches with respect to portability. We demonstrate a flexible parallel rendering framework built upon a task-based dynamic runtime environment enabling adaptable performance-oriented deployment on various platform configurations. Our task definition represents an effective and easy-to-control trade-off between sort-first and sort-last image compositing, enabling good scalability in combination with inherent dynamic load balancing. We conduct comprehensive benchmarks to verify the characteristics and potential of our novel task-based system design for high-performance visualization.