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    Three Architectures for Volume Rendering
    (Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Hesser, Jurgen; Manner, Reinhard; Knittel, Gunter; Strasser, Wolfgang; Pfister, Hanspeter; Kaufman, Arie
    Volume rendering is a key technique in scientific visualization that lends itself to significant exploitable parallelism. The high computational demands of real-time volume rendering and continued technological advances in the area of VLSl give impetus to the development of special-purpose volume rendering architectures. This paper presents and characterizes three recently developed volume rendering engines which are based on the ray-casting method. A taxonomy of the algorithmic variants of ray-casting and details of each ray-casting architecture are discussed. The paper then compares the machinefeatures and provides an outlook onfuture developments in the area of volume rendering hardware.
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    Towards a Scalable Architecture for Real-Time Volume Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association, 1995) Pfister, Hanspeter; Kaufman, Arie; Wessels, Frank; W. Strasser
    In this paper we present our research efforts towards a scalable volume rendering architecture for the real-time visualization of dynamically changing high-resolution datasets. Using a linearly skewed memory interleav­ ing we were able to develop a parallel dataflow model that leads to local, fixed-bandwidth interconnections be­ tween processing elements. This parallel dataflow model differs from previous work in that it requires no global communication of data except at the pixel level. Us­ ing this dataflow model we are developing Cube-4, an architecture that is scalable to very high performances and allows for modular and extensible hardware imple­ mentations.