Bachthaler, S.Strengert, M.Weiskopf, D.Ertl, T.Alan Heirich and Bruno Raffin and Luis Paulo dos Santos2014-01-262014-01-2620063-905673-40-11727-348Xhttps://doi.org/10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV06/075-082We 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.Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Viewing algorithms I.3.3 [Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism]: Color, shading, shadowing, and texture