PARALLEL VISUAL COMPUTING ON THE AP1000 - HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

To use the highly parallel AP1000 computer in visual computing, we dev eloped video hardware having a 400 Mbytes/s peak transfer rate and the ability to display HDTV images generated by processors at 30 frames/s , and parallel disk hardware that uses a 3.5-inch disk drive for each cell, providing a large capacity and high aggregate transfer speed. We also developed parallel visualization software CaVis, implementing it with a pipeline of task programs, each of which represents a visualiz ation phase. We applied this to the visual simulation of molecular dyn amics, global climates, and ray tracing.