Parallel Marching Blocks: A Practical Isosurfacing Algorithm for Large Data on Many-Core Architectures

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Date
2016
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Abstract
Interactive isosurface visualisation has been made possible by mapping algorithms to GPU architectures. However, current state-of-the-art isosurfacing algorithms usually consume large amounts of GPU memory owing to the additional acceleration structures they require. As a result, the continued limitations on available GPU memory mean that they are unable to deal with the larger datasets that are now increasingly becoming prevalent. This paper proposes a new parallel isosurface-extraction algorithm that exploits the blocked organisation of the parallel threads found in modern many-core platforms to achieve fast isosurface extraction and reduce the associated memory requirements. This is achieved by optimising thread co-operation within thread-blocks and reducing redundant computation; ultimately, an indexed triangular mesh can be produced. Experiments have shown that the proposed algorithm is much faster (up to 10x ) than state-of-the-art GPU algorithms and has a much smaller memory footprint, enabling it to handle much larger datasets (up to 64x) on the same GPU.
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@article{
10.1111:cgf.12897
, journal = {Computer Graphics Forum}, title = {{
Parallel Marching Blocks: A Practical Isosurfacing Algorithm for Large Data on Many-Core Architectures
}}, author = {
Liu, Baoquan
and
Clapworthy, Gordon J.
and
Dong, Feng
and
Wu, Enhua
}, year = {
2016
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
}, ISSN = {
1467-8659
}, DOI = {
10.1111/cgf.12897
} }
Citation