Implementations of Cube-4 on the Teramac custom computing machine

• Published in: Computers & graphics Vol. 21; no. 2; pp. 199 - 208
• Main Authors: Kanus, U., Meißner, M., Straßer, W., Pfister, H., Kaufman, A., Amerson, R., Carter, R.J., Culbertson, B., Kuekes, P., Snider, G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.03.1997
• ISSN: 0097-8493; 1873-7684
• DOI: 10.1016/S0097-8493(96)00083-0

We present two implementations of the Cube-4 volume rendering architecture, developed at SUNY Stony Brook, on the Teramac custom computing machine. Cube-4 uses a slice-parallel ray-casting algorithm that allows for a parallel and pipelined implementation of ray-casting. Tri-linear interpolation, surface normal estimation from interpolated samples, shading, classification, and compositing are part of the rendering pipeline. Using the partitioning schemes introduced in this paper, Cube-4 is capable of rendering in real-time large datasets ( e.g., 1024 3) with a limited number of rendering pipelines. Teramac is a hardware simulator developed at Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories. Teramac belongs to the new class of custom computing machines, which combine the speed of special-purpose hardware with the flexibility of general-purpose computers. Using Teramac as a development tool, we implemented two working Cube-4 prototypes capable of rendering 128 3 datasets in 0.65 s at a very low 0.96 MHz processing frequency. The results from these implementations indicate scalable performance with the number of rendering pipelines and real-time frame-rates for high-resolution datasets.