2009 Volume 2009 Pages 20090009
Using a parallel FE solver, a 3-D structural analysis, whose degrees of freedom may exceed 100 million, can be performed on a supercomputer such as the Earth Simulator, the IBM BlueGene/L, etc. To visualize the result data of such a huge scale analysis, a sort-last parallel rendering of polygons on a graphics cluster or a supercomputer is effective. In this paper, to remove the performance bottleneck in the sort-last parallel rendering, we try to accelerate an image composition stage by introducing fast and efficient image compression techniques based on the combination of run length and differential encoding methods. We applied the proposed techniques for the visualization of a huge-scale structural analysis, and the rendering speed of 170 millions triangles per second was obtained on a PC cluster.
