Real-time volume splatter for large scale data sets

Volume rendering has been a key technology in the visualization of data sets from various disciplines. However, real-time volume rendering of large scale data sets is still a challenging field due to the vast memory, bandwidth and computational requirements. In this paper, to visualize small to medium scale data set in real-time, we first proposed a new kind of volume rendering graphic processor based on object-order splatting algorithm in which flexible transfer function configuration and software optimization such as early opacity termination and transparent voxel occlusion can be achieved. At the same time, the processor also integrates an eight-way interleaved memory system and an efficient address calculation module to accelerate the voxel traversal process and maintain high cache hit rate. Multiple parallel rendering pipelines embedded also can achieve local parallelism on board. Second, in order to render large scale data sets, a real-time and general-purpose volume rendering architecture is also presented in this paper. By utilizing graphic processors on PC clusters, large scale data sets can be visualized resulted from the high parallel speedup among graphic processors.