Advances in the physical sciences have progressively delivered ever increasing,
already extremely large data sets to be analyzed. High performance volume rendering
has become critical to the scientists for a better understanding of the massive amounts
of data to be visualized. Cluster based rendering systems have become the base line
to achieve the power and
flexibility required to perform such task. Furthermore,
display arrays have become the most suitable solution to display these data sets at
their natural size and resolution which can be critical for human perception and
evaluation.
The work in this thesis aims at improving the scalability and usability of volume
rendering systems that target visualization on display arrays. The first part deals
with improving the performance by introducing the implementations of two parallel
compositing algorithms for volume rendering: direct send and binary swap. The
High quality Volume Rendering (HVR) framework has been extended to accommodate
parallel compositing where previously only serial compositing was possible. The
preliminary results show improvements in the compositing times for direct send even for a small number of processors. Unfortunately, the results of binary swap exhibit
a negative behavior. This is due to the naive use of the graphics hardware blending
mechanism. The expensive transfers account for the lengthy compositing times.
The second part targets the development of scalable and intuitive interaction
mechanisms. It introduces the development of a new client application for multitouch
tablet devices, like the Apple iPad. The main goal is to provide the HVR framework,
that has been extended to use tiled displays, a more intuitive and portable interaction
mechanism that can get advantage of the new environment. The previous client is
a PC application for the typical desktop settings that use a mouse and keyboard as
sources of interaction. The current implementation of the client lets the user steer
and change the opacity transfer function of the visualization via simple multitouch
gestures. Nonetheless, the user can freely move around, engage into discussion with
other users and easily pass the tablet around for others to use. Before, this was
not possible with the same ease of use. Ultimately, the collaborative possibilities are many and extremely interesting to explore.
| Date of Award | Jul 27 2011 |
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| Original language | English (US) |
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| Awarding Institution | - Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering
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| Supervisor | Markus Hadwiger (Supervisor) |
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