Skip to main content
Log in

Evaluation of per-pixel linked lists for distributed rendering and comparative analysis

  • Special Issue: Remote Visualization
  • Published:
Computing and Visualization in Science

Abstract

Rendering scenes with overlapping transparent faces is challenging for several reasons, including sorting geometry, managing multiple per-pixel fragments, and compositing. These questions have been solved for local rendering previously, for example by order-independent transparency approaches like Depth Peeling or A-buffer implementations. We discuss order-independent transparency algorithms in context of distributed rendering for large data sets or simulations which by design split the work load among a number of computation nodes. Furthermore, we evaluate a per-pixel linked list approach for distributed mesh rendering and multi-variant analysis of molecule data sets.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bavoil, L., Callahan, S.P., Lefohn, A., Comba, J.L.D., Silva, C.T.: Multi-fragment effects on the GPU using the k-buffer. In: Symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games, pp. 97–104 (2007)

  2. Bavoil, L., Enderton, E.: Constant-memory order-independent transparency techniques. NVIDIA Corp. (2011)

  3. Bavoil, L., Myers, K.: Order independent transparency with dual depth peeling. NVIDIA Corp. (2008)

  4. Berman, H.M., Westbrook, J., Feng, Z., Gilliland, G., Bhat, T.N., Weissig, H., Shindyalov, I.N., Bourne, P.E.: The protein data bank. Nucl. Acids Res. 28, 235–242 (2000). http://www.pdb.org

    Google Scholar 

  5. Blinn, J.F.: A generalization of algebraic surface drawing. ACM Trans. Graph. 1(3), 235–256 (1982)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Brodlie, K., Brooke, J., Chen, M., Chisnall, D., Fewings, A.J., Hughes, C., John, N.W., Jones, M.W., Riding, M., Roard, N.: Visual supercomputing: technologies, applications and challenges. Comput. Graph. Forum 24(2), 217–245 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Brodlie, K., Duce, D.A., Gallop, J.R., Walton, J.P.R.B., Wood, J.: Distributed and collaborative visualization. Comput. Graph. Forum 23(2), 223–251 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Brown, P.: OpenGL Extension: \(\text{ NV }\_\text{ shader }\_\text{ buffer }\_\text{ store }\) (2012)

  9. Brown, P., Dodd, C., Kilgard, M., Werness, E.: OpenGL Extension: \(\text{ NV }\_\text{ shader }\_\text{ buffer }\_\text{ load }\) (2010)

  10. Carpenter, L.: The A-buffer, an antialiased hidden surface method. In: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH ’84, vol. 18, pp. 103–108. ACM, New York (1984)

  11. Edelsbrunner, H.: Deformable smooth surface design. Discret. Comput. Geom. 21(1), 87–115 (1999)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Eilemann, S., Makhinya, M., Pajarola, R.: Equalizer: a scalable parallel rendering framework. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 15(3), 436–452 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Everitt, C.: Interactive order-independent transparency. NVIDIA Corp. (2001)

  14. Fife, M., Strugar, F., Davies, L.: Whitepaper: adaptive volumetric shadow maps. Technical report, Intel (2013)

  15. Foley, J.D., Dam, A.V., Feiner, S.K., Hughes, J.F.: Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, 2nd edn. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co. Inc., Reading (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Gross, M., Pfister, H.: Point-Based Graphics. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Havran, V., Zajac, J., Drahokoupil, J., Seidel, H.P.: MPI informatics building model as data for your research. Research Report MPI-I-2009-4-004, MPI Informatik, Saarbruecken, Germany (2009)

  18. Knowles, P., Leach, G., Zambetta, F.: Efficient layered fragment buffer techniques. In: Cozzi, P., Riccio, C. (eds.) OpenGL Insights, pp. 279–292. CRC Press, Boca Raton (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Liu, F., Huang, M.C., Liu, X.H., Wu, E.H.: Efficient depth peeling via bucket sort. In: Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics, pp. 51–57. ACM (2009)

  20. Makhinya, M.: Performance challenges in distributed rendering systems. Ph.D. thesis, Institut für Informatik, Universität Zürich (2012)

  21. Maule, M., Comba, J.A.L.D., Torchelsen, R.P., Bastos, R.: Technical section: a survey of raster-based transparency techniques. Comput. Graph. 35(6), 1023–1034 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Meligy, A.: Parallel and distributed visualization: the state of the art. In: Fifth International Conference on Computer Graphics, Imaging and Visualisation, CGIV ’08, pp. 329–336 (2008)

  23. Moreland, K.: IceT Users’ Guide and Reference Version 2.1, vol. Tech Report SAND 2011–5011. Sandia National Laboratories (2011)

  24. Oberhumer, M.: Lzo documentation (2011). http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/

  25. O’Neil, M.A., Burtscher, M.: Floating-point data compression at 75 gb/s on a GPU. In: Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on General Purpose Processing on Graphics Processing Units, GPGPU-4, pp. 7:1–7:7. ACM (2011)

  26. Porter, T., Duff, T.: Compositing digital images. In: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH ’84, pp. 253–259. ACM, New York (1984)

  27. Reina, G., Ertl, T.: Hardware-accelerated glyphs for mono- and dipoles in molecular dynamics visualization. In: EuroVis05: IEEE VGTC Symposium on Visualization, pp. 177–182 (2005)

  28. Repplinger, M., Löffler, A., Rubinstein, D., Slusallek, P.: DRONE: a flexible framework for distributed rendering and display. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Visual Computing 2009 (ISVC09). Springer (2009)

  29. Richards, F.M.: Areas, volumes, packing, and protein structure. Annu. Rev. Biophys. Bioeng. 6(1), 151–176 (1977)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Richardson, J.S.: The anatomy and taxonomy of protein structure. Adv. Protein Chem. 34, 167–339 (1981)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Salvi, M., Montgomery, J., Lefohn, A.: Adaptive transparency. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on High Performance Graphics, HPG ’11, pp. 119–126. ACM, New York (2011)

  32. Vasilakis, A.A., Fudos, I.: Z-fighting aware depth peeling. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 Posters, SIGGRAPH ’11, p. 77:1. ACM (2011)

  33. Wittenbrink, C.M.: R-buffer: a pointerless A-buffer hardware architecture. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Graphics hardware, HWWS ’01, pp. 73–80. ACM (2001)

  34. Yang, J.C., Hensley, J., Grün, H., Thibieroz, N.: Real-time concurrent linked list construction on the GPU. In: Proceedings of the 21st Eurographics Conference on Rendering, vol. 29, pp. 1297–1304 (2010)

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of SFB 716 project D.3 and D.4, and by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) as part of the MCSimVis and FeToL project.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel Kauker.

Additional information

Communicated by: Fabrizio Lamberti and Andrea Sanna (Guest Editors).

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Kauker, D., Krone, M., Panagiotidis, A. et al. Evaluation of per-pixel linked lists for distributed rendering and comparative analysis. Comput. Visual Sci. 15, 111–121 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00791-013-0203-6

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00791-013-0203-6

Keywords

Mathematics Subject Classification

Navigation