An Accelerated Clip Algorithm for Unstructured Meshes: A Batch-Driven Approach
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Date
2024
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
The clip technique is a popular method for visualizing complex structures and phenomena within 3D unstructured meshes. Meshes can be clipped by specifying a scalar isovalue to produce an output unstructured mesh with its external surface as the isovalue. Similar to isocontouring, the clipping process relies on scalar data associated with the mesh points, including scalar data generated by implicit functions such as planes, boxes, and spheres, which facilitates the visualization of results interior to the grid. In this paper, we introduce a novel batch-driven parallel algorithm based on a sequential clip algorithm designed for high-quality results in partial volume extraction. Our algorithm comprises five passes, each progressively processing data to generate the resulting clipped unstructured mesh. The novelty lies in the use of fixed-size batches of points and cells, which enable rapid workload trimming and parallel processing, leading to a significantly improved memory footprint and run-time performance compared to the original version. On a 32-core CPU, the proposed batch-driven parallel algorithm demonstrates a run-time speed-up of up to 32.6x and a memory footprint reduction of up to 4.37x compared to the existing sequential algorithm. The software is currently available under an open-source license in the VTK visualization system.
Description
CCS Concepts: Computing methodologies → Shared memory algorithms; Theory of computation → Computational geometry
@inproceedings{10.2312:pgv.20241130,
booktitle = {Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization},
editor = {Reina, Guido and Rizzi, Silvio},
title = {{An Accelerated Clip Algorithm for Unstructured Meshes: A Batch-Driven Approach}},
author = {Tsalikis, Spiros and Schroeder, Will and Szafir, Daniel and Moreland, Kenneth},
year = {2024},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-348X},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-243-1},
DOI = {10.2312/pgv.20241130}
}