Image Space Advection on graphics hardware

Abstract

The scientific visualization and computer graphics communities have witnessed a tremendous rise in graphics processing unit (GPU) related literature and methodology recently. This is due in part to the rapidly increasing processing speed offered by graphics cards. Parallel to this, we have seen several advances made in the area of texture-based flow visualization. We present a texture-based flow visualization technique, Image Space Advection (ISA), that takes advantage of the computing power offered by recent, state-of-the-art GPUs. We have implemented a completely GPU-based version of the ISA algorithm. Here we describe our implementation in detail, including both the advantages and disadvantages of implementing ISA on the GPU. The result is state-of-the-art technique that demonstrates the latest in terms of both flow visualization methodology and GPU programming.