Parallel Rendering of 3D AMR Data on the SGI/Cray T3E

This paper describes work-in-progress on developing parallel visualization strategies for 3D Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data. AMR is a simple and powerful tool for modeling many important scientific and engineering problems. However, visualization tools for 3D AMR data are not generally available. Converting AMR data onto a uniform mesh would result in high storage requirements, and rendering the uniform-mesh data on an average graphics workstation can be painfully slow if not impossible. The adaptive nature of the embedded mesh demands sophisticated visualization calculations. In this work, we compare the performance and storage requirements of a parallel volume renderer for regular-mesh data with a new parallel renderer based on adaptive sampling. While both renderers can achieve interactive visualization, the new approach offers significant performance gains, as indicated by our experiments on the SGI/Cray T3E.