OpenGL Hijacking with GLuRay

GLuRay is a program which runs on top of existing external visualization applications. Function calls to draw 3D objects are intercepted and instead rendered with our optimized software ray tracer Manta. This allows both high performance software rendering to match the existing display as well as advanced rendering effects for enhanced image quality.

Overwrites 3D Drawing Calls in Existing Applications Such as ParaView/VAPOR/VisIt/EnSight
Uses Ray Tracing
Acceleration Structures for Speeding up Large-Scale Polygonal Rendering
Advanced Rendering Effects for Enhanced Image Quality

Advanced Rendering Effects

ParaView - Aluminum Ball Impact

Ambient Occlusion
Reflections
Soft Shadows

VAPOR - Stellar Magnetism

Magnetic Polar Reversal in a Sun-like Star

Streamlines Show Magnetic Fields

Ambient Occlusion Adds Depth Cues

Reflections Can Be Added Externally

Animation and Streamline Creation is Handled by VAPOR

Submitted to SciDAC 2011- Won an OASCR

Accelerated Rendering

GLuRay uses acceleration structures and avoids shading occluded (hidden) geometry. Brute-force OpenGL implementations show linear scaling with triangle counts, while our program shows logarithmic scaling when rendering hundreds of millions of triangles allowing for interactive visualization of over 5 fps up to 128 million triangles.

GLuRay scales O(log(n)) with respect to geometry count. ParaView/VisIt/VAPOR/EnSight and other visualization applications use O(n) rendering algorithms natively which scale linearly with geometry count. As triangle counts grow into the tens or hundreds of millions, GLuRay provides large runtime speedups.

Over 300x faster than Software Mesa

OpenGL translation introduces very little overhead

OpenGL implementations are often brute-force

ParaView uses a single display list for acceleration

Each rendered frame only requires a few matrix transforms