Parallel visualization of large-scale aerodynamics calculations: a case study on the Cray T3E

This paper reports the performance of a parallel volume rendering algorithm for visualizing a large-scale unstructured-grid dataset produced by a three-dimensional aerodynamics simulation. This dataset, containing over 18 million tetrahedra, allows us to extend our performance results to a problem which is more than 30 times larger than the one we examined previously. This high resolution dataset also allows us to see fine, three-dimensional features in the flow field. All our tests were performed on the SGI/Cray T3E operated by NASA´s Goddard Space Flight Center. Using 511 processors, a rendering rate of almost 9 million tetrahedra/second was achieved with a parallel overhead of 26%.