AN OPTIMAL PARALLEL ALGORITHM FOR VOLUME RAY CASTING

Volume rendering by ray casting is computationally expensive. For inte ractive volume visualization, rendering must be done in real time (30 frames/s). Since the typical size of a 3D dataset is 256(3), parallel processing is imperative. In this paper, we present an O(log n) EREW a lgorithm for volume rendering. We use O(n(3)) processors that can be o ptimized to O(log(3) n) time with O(n(3)/log(3)n) processors. We have implemented our algorithm on a MasPar MP-1. The implementation results show that a frame of size 256(3) is generated in Ils by 4096 processo rs. This time can be further reduced by the use of large number of pro cessors.