Scalable Architecture for Real Time Volume Rendering

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This research deals with the development of a new scalable volume visualization architecture and its associated algorithms. The architecture, called Cube-4, exploits parallelism and pipelining to achieve real-time rendering of high-resolution images from volume data. The architecture is based on an algorithm for ray casting of a volume buffer of voxels which is stored as a skewed distributed memory to support conflict-free access to voxel structures. It performs interpolation of sampled points, shading, and compositing to generate the pixel values. Computations are done using limited communication between processors, so that the architecture is scalable over a wide range of performances and image resolutions. This project encompasses algorithm development, architecture research, and construction of a reduced-resolution prototype.