A PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE VOLUME VISUALIZATION APPLICATIONS

Volume visualization is an important tool in many scientific applicati ons, requiring intensive processing-and dealing with large amounts of data. For interactive and specialized applications one needs to use hi gh-performance computing techniques. This paper describes the Parallel Volume Visualization (PW) toolkit. PW is an Application Programming I nterface (API) for developing volume visualization applications. It wa s designed to be easily portable across high performance parallel comp uters such as shared memory and distributed memory parallel computers. Good speed-up rates have been achieved with a preliminary implementat ion of PW on a SGI 4D480 multiprocessor. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier S cience Ltd