Abstract:

In this dissertation we present special-purpose volume rendering architectures that are capable of rendering high-resolution (e.g., 1024^3) datasets at 30 frames per second. The architectures, Cube-3 and Cube-4, exploit a high degree of parallelism to provide real-time parallel and perspective viewing from arbitrary directions. They allow for interactive control of rendering and projection parameters and the direct visualization of dynamically changing volume data. We have simulated the algorithm and architectures and have implemented a working prototype of the Cube-4 slice-parallel hardware on the Teramac configurable custom computer at Hewlett-Packard Labs. Our results indicate true real-time performance for high-resolution datasets and linear scalability of performance with the number of processing pipelines.