IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems
Online ISSN : 1745-1361
Print ISSN : 0916-8532
Regular Section
An Effective Load Balancing Scheme for 3D Texture-Based Sort-Last Parallel Volume Rendering on GPU Clusters
Won-Jong LEEVason P. SRINIWoo-Chan PARKShigeru MURAKITack-Don HAN
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2008 Volume E91.D Issue 3 Pages 846-856

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Abstract

We present an adaptive dynamic load balancing scheme for 3D texture based sort-last parallel volume rendering on a PC cluster equipped with GPUs. Our scheme exploits not only task parallelism but also data parallelism during rendering by combining the hierarchical data structures (octree and parallel BSP tree) in order to skip empty regions and distribute proper workloads to rendering nodes. Our scheme can also conduct a valid parallel rendering and image compositing in visibility order by employing a 3D clustering algorithm. To alleviate the imbalance when the transfer function is changed, a load rebalancing is inexpensively supported by exchanging only needed data. A detailed performance analysis is provided and scaling characteristics of our scheme are discussed. These show that our scheme can achieve significant performance gains by increasing parallelism and decreasing synchronizing costs compared to the traditional static distribution schemes.

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© 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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