MPI-hybrid Parallelism for Volume Rendering on Large, Multi-core Systems

Howison, Mark; Bethel, E. Wes; Childs, Hank

MPI-hybrid Parallelism for Volume Rendering on Large, Multi-core Systems

Files

001-010.pdf (387.89 KB)

Date

2010

Authors

Howison, Mark
Bethel, E. Wes
Childs, Hank

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

This work studies the performance and scalability characteristics of hybrid parallel programming and execution as applied to raycasting volume rendering a staple visualization algorithm on a large, multi-core platform. Historically, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become the de-facto standard for parallel programming and execution on modern parallel systems. As the computing industry trends towards multi-core processors, with fourand six-core chips common today and 128-core chips coming soon, we wish to better understand how algorithmic and parallel programming choices impact performance and scalability on large, distributed-memory multi-core systems. Our findings indicate that the hybrid-parallel implementation, at levels of concurrency ranging from 1,728 to 216,000, performs better, uses a smaller absolute memory footprint, and consumes less communication bandwidth than the traditional, MPI-only implementation.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV10/001-010
,
booktitle = {Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization
},
editor = {James Ahrens and Kurt Debattista and Renato Pajarola
},
title = {{MPI-hybrid Parallelism for Volume Rendering on Large, Multi-core Systems
}},
author = {Howison, Mark and 
Bethel, E. Wes and 
Childs, Hank
},
year = {2010
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-348X
},
ISBN = {978-3-905674-21-7
},
DOI = {/10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV10/001-010
}
}