Design of a high performance volume visualization system

Abstract

Visunlizing three dimensional discrete datasets has been a topic of many research projects and papers in the past decade. We discuss the issues that come up when designing a whole computer system cnpable of visualizing these datasets in real time. We explain the three way chicken and egg problem and discuss HewlettPackard’s effort at breaking it with the Voxelator API extensions to OpenGL. We enumerate what a good hardware design should accomplish, We discuss what system issues are important and show how to integrate volume visualization hardware in one of Hewlett-Packard’s graphics accelerators, the VISUALIZE-48XP. We show why the Voxelator is an efficient and well designed API by explnining how various existing hardware engines will easily tit into the Voxelator framework. CR