Publications

SIMD Parallel Raytracing of Unstructured Polyhedral Grids

Efficient visualization of unstructured data is vital for domain scientists, yet is often impeded by techniques which rely on intermediate representations that consume time and memory, require resampling data, or inefficient implementations of direct ray tracing methods. Previous work to accelerate rendering of unstructured grids have focused on the use of GPUs that are not available in many large-scale computing systems. In this paper, we present a new technique for directly visualizing unstructured grids using a software ray tracer built as a module for the OSPRay ray tracing framework from Intel. Our method is capable of implicit isosurface rendering and direct volume ray casting homogeneous grids of hexahedra, tetrahedra, and multi-level datasets at interactive frame rates on compute nodes without a GPU using an open-source, production-level ray tracing framework that scales with variable SIMD widths and thread counts.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{rathke2015simd,
    title={SIMD Parallel Ray Tracing of Homogeneous Polyhedral Grids.},
    author={Rathke, Brad and Wald, Ingo and Chiu, Kenneth and Brownlee, Carson},
    booktitle={EGPGV},
    pages={33--41},
    year={2015}
}

The Visualization of Unstructured Polyhedral Grids

Efficient visualization of volumetric data sets is an ever present need in the scientific visualization community. While interactive visualization of regularly structured grids is a largely solved problem unstructured grids are a persistent problem. Most attempts at improving the speed at which unstructured grids may be rendered have focused on utilization of GPU hardware which is in general only available in a minority of systems in any given data center. This thesis presents a method of visualizing unstructured grid data sets without the use of GPU hardware using a software ray tracer built as a plug-in module for the Intel OSPRay ray tracing framework. The method is capable of implicit isosurface rendering and direct volume ray casting of homogeneous unstructured grids and multilevel data sets with interactive frame rates and scales with variable SIMD widths and thread counts.

BibTeX:

@mastersthesis{rathke2015visualization,
    title={The visualization of unstructured polyhedral grids},
    author={Rathke, Brad},
    year={2015},
    publisher={STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BINGHAMTON}
}