Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We describe a framework for direct volume rendering of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) data that operates directly on the hierarchical grid structure, without the need to resample data onto a single, uniform rectilinear grid. The framework can be used for a range of renderers optimized for particular hardware architectures: a hardware-assisted renderer for single-processor graphics workstations, and a massively parallel software-only renderer for supercomputers. It is also possible to use the framework for distributed rendering servers. By exploiting the multiresolution structure of AMR data, the hardware-assisted renderers can render large AMR data sets at interactive rates, even if the data is stored remotely.