An algorithm is presented for volume rendering in environments of parallel virtual machines. Toreduce the communication cost, as well as to guarantee the locality of all subtasks, the volume data is dividedinto and organized as a series of slices. The task subdivision algorithm produces acceptable load balancing bymaintaining and employing a database of performance indices. An asynchronous binary method merges allpartial images in O(Iogn) time. An efficient development platform based on TCP/IP and Socket standards canhelp parallelize various rendering algorithms on virtual machines. Our algorithm was implemented on thisplatform using the classical client/server paradigm. The scalabilities of both task size and host number weretested experimentally.``
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