| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
MORI Shin-ishiro Kyoto Univ., Graduate School of Engineering, Associate Professor, 工学研究科, 助教授 (20243058)
NAKASHIMA Hiroshi Kyoto Univ., Graduate School of Engineering, Associate Professor, 工学研究科, 助教授 (10243057)
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| Research Abstract |
We produced a prototype of ReVolver/C40, a parallel computer for volume rendering, following the research result of '94.
The caharacteristic functions of ReVolver/C40 are realtime processing, perspective drawing, rendering of translucnet objects, and volume ray-tracing.
ReVolver/C40 is consisted of macro-pipeline of 3-stages, ray-casting, pixel-calculation, and shading. Each stage render at high-speed by parallel processing of fine-grained pipeline processing depending on its form of processing. The performance is bounded by the pixel calculation stage. It is especially significant whether all the voxels crossed by a ray can be read or not. So, ReVolver/C40 adopts the triple volume memory, and the scheme to sample voxels in the direction of the main axis of a ray. This enables parallel volume access to any ray of arbitrary direction.
From the design data at the point of PCB design, the rendering speed is 2.5 frames per second, in the case that the pixel calculation stage is consisted of 128 DSPs (TMS320C40,50MHz) . ReVolver/C40 can speeds up in proportion to a number of DSPs because of its scalable configuration.
On the other hand, triple memory, the heart of ReVolver/C40, hold the problem about its big size. So, we also designed a single memory configuration which also enables parallel voxel access on a ray. It is achieved by limtting the angle of the viewing field to 54ﾟ.It is available because the result of scientific calculation or medical vision do not need a wide viewing field.
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