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Item Three Architectures for Volume Rendering(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Hesser, Jurgen; Manner, Reinhard; Knittel, Gunter; Strasser, Wolfgang; Pfister, Hanspeter; Kaufman, ArieVolume 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.Item Towards a Scalable Architecture for Real-Time Volume Rendering(The Eurographics Association, 1995) Pfister, Hanspeter; Kaufman, Arie; Wessels, Frank; W. StrasserIn 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.