Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization

A number of problems are well suited for volumetric representation for both simulation and storage, however, the large amount of data that needs to be processed and rendered with these volumes makes interactive manipulation extremely challenging. In this paper, we present a scalable PC cluster system (VG cluster) designed specifically to enable simultaneous volumetric computation and visualization, using compositing hardware devices and the latest PC graphics accelerators. We demonstrate the flexibility and performance of this system with several different applications that include reaction-diffusion simulation, volumetric image processing, and vector field visualization. We also discuss how to improve the visual computing performance of this system with some load balancing techniques.