Dynamic load balancing for parallel volume rendering

Parallel volume rendering is one of the most efficient techniques to achieve real time visualization of large datasets by distributing the data and the rendering process over a cluster of machines. However, when using level of detail techniques or when zooming on parts of the datasets, load unbalance becomes a challenging issue that has not been widely studied in the context of hardware-based rendering. In this paper, we address this issue and show how to achieve good load balancing for parallel level of detail volume rendering. We do so by dynamically distributing the data among the rendering nodes according to the load of the previous frame. We illustrate the efficiency of our technique on large datasets.