Interactive flow-field evaluation on a distributed-memory architecture

We describe techniques for parallelizing rendering applications on a distributed-memory multicomputer (MANNA) that is linked to a high-performance plygon rasterizer (VISA). Several multicomputer nodes and rasterizer channels are interconnected by a highly configurable hierarchy of crosbars. Projected primitives are distributed from computing nodes to rasterizer channels according to their screen regions. An application prototype for real-time visualization of particles in a flow field from the automotive industry is implemented on this hardware platform. The system enables a user to place a particle stream interactively in a simulated flow field in order to gain insight into the characteristics of the flow field. The huge amount of data requires that both the evaluation of the flow field and the visualization of the scene be parallelized. The software architecture of the application prototype is based on the MPSC (Modifier Presenter Sensor Controller) model. We explore how it benefits from the presented scalable hardware architecture in order to meet the requirements of a highly interactive system.