Transaction of the Japan Society for Simulation Technology
Vol. 6 (2014) No. 2 p. 15-26

  In this paper, we propose a novel remote visualization system based on particle-based volume rendering (PBVR)¹⁾, which enables interactive analyses of extreme scale volume data located on remote computing systems. The system consists of a Server, which generates particles (rendering primitives), and a Client, which process volume rendering, and particles are transferred from Server to Client. The size of particle data is determined by the resolution of rendering images, and is significantly smaller than the original volume data. Therefore, the system enables an interactive visualization without transferring huge volume data. The smallness of the particle data is useful also for achieving a high frame rate. In the system, Server is highly parallelized on multiple General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs) using a hybrid MPI-CUDA programing model. The particle generation is accelerated by two orders of magnitudes compared with CPU, and structured and unstructured volume data with ～10⁸ cells are processed within a second. The total performance of remote visualization is compared against a commodity visualization tool, and from 7x to 48x faster processing speed is achieved.