Application Papers

1) Susan Frank and Arie Kaufman, Distributed Volume Rendering on a Visualization Cluster, In Proceedings of CAD/Graphics, December 2005, Hong Kong, China, pp. 371-376, Full Paper (PDF).

Abstract: We describe the rendering of massive volumes on a volume visualization cluster. We present our data distribution scheme and introduce an algorithm which reduces the memory requirement with no loss of accuracy. The volume is automatically cropped and partitioned into small volume blocks. The bounding boxes of these volume blocks are used at run-time for flexible partitioning of the volume across the network. We present results of rendering the full Visible Male color dataset, seismic data, and several large micro-CT scanned fossil and teeth datasets.  

2) Zhe Fan, Feng Qiu, Arie Kaufman, Suzanne Yoakum-Stover , GPU Cluster for High Performance Computing , In Proceedings of ACM / IEEE SC2004 Conference, November 6-12, 2004, Pittsburgh PA, USA, Full Paper (PDF).

Abstract: Inspired by the attractive Flops/$ ratio and the incredible growth in the speed of modern graphics processing units (GPUs), we propose to use a cluster of GPUs for high performance scientific computing. As an example application, we have developed a parallel Lattice Boltzmann model (LBM) on a GPU cluster and have simulated the dispersion of airborne contaminants in the Times Square area of New York City. Using 30 GPU nodes, our simulation can compute the 480 * 400 * 80 LBM in 0.31 second / step. Compared to our another implementation on the same cluster using CPUs for computation, the speedup is 4.6. Besides the LBM, we also discuss other potential applications of the GPU cluster such as cellular automata, PDE solvers, and FEM.  

3) Susan Frank and Arie Kaufman, Massive Volume Rendering on a Volume Visualization Cluster, Technical Report, April 26, 2004.

Abstract: This paper describes rendering of massive volumes on a volume visualization cluster. We present our data distribution scheme and introduce an algorithm which reduces the memory requirement with no loss of accuracy. The volume is tightly cropped to a segmented region and partitioned into small volume blocks. The bounding boxes of these volume blocks are used for flexible and efficient distribution of the volume across the network at run time. We present results of rendering the Visible Male color dataset as well as several large CT scanned fossil and teeth datasets at interactive rates. Volumes are rendered on a commodity PC cluster system using multipass rendering on commercially available VolumePro1000 rendering hardware, with image compostition performed on HP Sepia-2a hardware compositing, and image transfer on high speed ServerNet II interconnects.  

4) Zhe Fan, Feng Qiu, Arie Kaufman, Suzanne Yoakum-Stover , Zippy: A Framework for Computation and Visualization on a GPU Cluster , Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics), 27(2):341-350, 2008. Full Paper (PDF).

Abstract: Due to its high performance/cost ratio, a GPU cluster is an attractive platform for large scale general-purpose computation and visualization applications. However, the programming model for high performance generalpurpose computation on GPU clusters remains a complex problem. In this paper, we introduce the Zippy framework, a general and scalable solution to this problem. It abstracts the GPU cluster programming with a two-level parallelism hierarchy and a non-uniform memory access (NUMA) model. Zippy preserves the advantages of both message passing and shared-memory models. It employs global arrays (GA) to simplify the communication, synchronization, and collaboration among multiple GPUs. Moreover, it exposes data locality to the programmer for optimal performance and scalability. We present three example applications developed with Zippy: sort-last volume rendering, Marching Cubes isosurface extraction and rendering, and lattice Boltzmann flow simulation with online visualization. They demonstrate that Zippy can ease the development and integration of parallel visualization, graphics, and computation modules on a GPU cluster.  

 Related Papers

Susan Frank and Arie Kaufman, Dependency Graph Scheduling in a Volumetric Ray Tracing Architecture, In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 2002 , Saarbruecken, Germany, pp. 127-135, Full Paper (PDF).   

Feng Qiu, Ye Zhao, Zhe Fan, Xiaoming Wei, Haik Lorenz, Jianning Wang, Suzanne Yoakum-Stover, Arie Kaufman and Klaus Mueller, Accelerated Dispersion Simulation for Urban Security, In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 2004 , Austin Texas,  pp. 553-560. 

Abhijeet Ghosh, Poojan Prabhu, Arie Kaufman and Klaus Mueller, Hardware Assisted Multichannel Volume Rendering, In Proceedings of Computer Graphics International 2003 , pp. 2-7.