ADAPTIVE LOAD BALANCING APPARATUS USING A COMBINATION OF HIERARCHICAL DATA STRUCTURES FOR PARALLEL VOLUME RENDERING

摘要

An adaptive load-balanced parallel volume rendering method using a combination of hierarchical data structures is provided to extract actual data from which an empty inner space has been skipped and transmit the actual data to a parallel rendering unit to improve rendering performance. Entire volume data is split into small sub volumes having a specific size by using the octree hierarchical data structure. An empty space of each sub volume is skipped and only an actual sub volume is extracted. Actual sub volumes in the octree hierarchical structure are load-balanced and grouped by using the BSP tree hierarchical data structure, and then transmitted to a parallel rendering node. A local BSP tree is searched, rendering priority of the sub volumes is determined, a global BPS tree is searched after rendering, combination priority is determined, and a final image is generated. When opacity of a specific region of volume data is changed at a user's request so that the entire load balance is varied, load re-balancing is attempted only with communication between previously transmitted data without re-transmitting the entire data to the parallel rendering node.