Parallel Texture-Based Vector Field Visualization on Curved Surfaces Using GPU Cluster Computers

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Date
2006
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
We adopt a technique for texture-based visualization of flow fields on curved surfaces for parallel computation on a GPU cluster. The underlying LIC method relies on image-space calculations and allows the user to visualize a full 3D vector field on arbitrary and changing hypersurfaces. By using parallelization, both the visualization speed and the maximum data set size are scaled with the number of cluster nodes. A sort-first strategy with image-space decomposition is employed to distribute the workload for the LIC computation, while a sort-last approach with an object-space partitioning of the vector field is used to increase the total amount of available GPU memory. We specifically address issues for parallel GPU-based vector field visualization, such as reduced locality of memory accesses caused by particle tracing, dynamic load balancing for changing camera parameters, and the combination of image-space and object-space decomposition in a hybrid approach. Performance measurements document the behavior of our implementation on a GPU cluster with AMD Opteron CPUs, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra GPUs, and Infiniband network connection.
Description

        
@inproceedings{
:10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV06/075-082
, booktitle = {
Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization
}, editor = {
Alan Heirich and Bruno Raffin and Luis Paulo dos Santos
}, title = {{
Parallel Texture-Based Vector Field Visualization on Curved Surfaces Using GPU Cluster Computers
}}, author = {
Bachthaler, S.
and
Strengert, M.
and
Weiskopf, D.
and
Ertl, T.
}, year = {
2006
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association
}, ISSN = {
1727-348X
}, ISBN = {
3-905673-40-1
}, DOI = {
/10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV06/075-082
} }
Citation