A hierarchical memory model for terrain data management in interactive terrain visualization.

摘要

This work describes the use of a hierarchical memory model for the performance estimation of the interactive terrain visualization system as part of the system design process. Such visualization systems must be capable of: (a) working with potentially massive datasets which can exceed the both the memory and the disk storage capacity; (b) rendering the data at a real-time frame-rate which exceed the capabilities of general-purpose CPUs. While several solutions to these problems have been presented in the literature, they failed to address the general recurrent performance problem of the timely movement of data throughout the complete visualization system. This work presents a model for the estimation of the performance of interactive terrain visualization systems which incorporates the characteristics of hardware components found in visualization systems as well as the characteristics and access patterns associated with terrain data. To validate our model, we performed a test case study. Our results show that the model is able to characterize the general performance behavior of the visualization systems, but the estimated performance diverged from the measured performance as the dataset sizes increased.