Hybrid Parallel Volume Rendering with Distributed Graphics Hardware

For lack of graphics module,general shared memory Multiprocessors can not be used to visualize the three-dimensional scientific computational datasets generated on themselves using hardware-accelerated volume rendering techniques.An algorithm of the hybrid parallel rendering based on multiprocessors and distributed graphics workstations is presented.The datasets are processed on both local multiprocessors and distributed graphics workstations.The following image composition is performed by multiprocessors to utilize efficiently communicating capabilities.Through load balancing optimization,parallel rendering pipeline can overlap rendering,compositing and display process.Experimental results show that the interactive rendering abilities can be achieved when handling large datasets resided in multiprocessors with 1 024×1 024 image resolution.