Hybrid Parallelism for Volume Rendering at Large Scale

We studied the performance and scalability characteristics of ``hybrid'' parallel programming and execution as applied to raycasting volume rendering — a staple visualization algorithm — on a large, multi-core platform. Our findings indicated that the hybrid-parallel implementation, at levels of concurrency ranging from 1,728 to 216,000, performs better, uses a smaller absolute memory footprint, and consumes less communication bandwidth than the traditional, MPI-only implementation. (More information)