Ogata1, MasatoMuraki, ShigeruLiu, XuezhenMa, Kwan-LiuI. Fujishiro and K. Mueller and A. Kaufman2014-01-292014-01-2920031-58113-745-11727-8376https://doi.org/10.2312/VG/VG03/061-068An experimental study of software image compositing that we have carried out on a 512-node PC cluster shows the necessity of hardware compositing support to make possible real-time volume visualization scalable with large PC clusters. This paper describes the design and performance evaluation of such a hardware image compositing device. A PC cluster using such devices along with commodity graphics cards can enable simultaneous simulation and volume visualization.