Binary-swap volumetric rendering on the T3D

This paper presents a data distributed parallel raytraced volume rendering algorithm and its implementation on the CRI T3D. This algorithm distributes the data and the computational load to individual processing units to achieve fast and high-quality rendering of high-resolution data. The volume data, once distributed, is left intact. The processing nodes perform local raytracing of their subvolume concurrently. No communication between processing units is needed during this local ray-tracing process. A subimages is generated by each processing unit and the final image is obtained by compositing subimages in the proper order by the Binary-Swap algorithm. Performance of this algorithm on the T3D is presented and compared to an implementation on the CM-5.