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Direct volume rendering of unstructured tetrahedral meshes using CUDA and OpenMP

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Abstract

Direct volume visualization is an important method in many areas, including computational fluid dynamics and medicine. Achieving interactive rates for direct volume rendering of large unstructured volumetric grids is a challenging problem, but parallelizing direct volume rendering algorithms can help achieve this goal. Using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), we propose a GPU-based volume rendering algorithm that itself is based on a cell projection-based ray-casting algorithm designed for CPU implementations. We also propose a multicore parallelized version of the cell-projection algorithm using OpenMP. In both algorithms, we favor image quality over rendering speed. Our algorithm has a low memory footprint, allowing us to render large datasets. Our algorithm supports progressive rendering. We compared the GPU implementation with the serial and multicore implementations. We observed significant speed-ups that, together with progressive rendering, enables reaching interactive rates for large datasets.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Koji Koyamada for the volumetric datasets. The Comb dataset is courtesy of NASA. The Sf1 and Sf2 datasets are courtesy of David R. O’Hallaron and Jonathan R. Shewchuk (CMU). We are grateful to Rana Nelson for proofreading.

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  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Bilkent, 06800, Ankara, Turkey

    Erhan Okuyan & Uğur Güdükbay

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  1. Erhan Okuyan
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  2. Uğur Güdükbay
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Correspondence to Uğur Güdükbay.

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Okuyan, E., Güdükbay, U. Direct volume rendering of unstructured tetrahedral meshes using CUDA and OpenMP. J Supercomput 67, 324–344 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-1004-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-1004-x

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