Massively parallel software rendering for visualizing large-scale data sets

For some time, researchers have done production visualization almost exclusively using high-end graphics workstations. They routinely archived and analyzed the outputs of simulations running on massively parallel supercomputers. Generally, a feature extraction step and a geometric modeling step to significantly reduce the data's size preceded the actual data rendering. Researchers also used this procedure to visualize large-scale data produced by high-resolution sensors and scanners. While the graphics workstation allowed interactive visualization of the extracted data, looking only at a lower resolution and polygonal representation of the data defeated the original purpose of performing the high-resolution simulation or scanning.