Scalable Parallel Distance Field Construction for Large-Scale Applications

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 21; no. 10; pp. 1187 - 1200
• Main Authors: Hongfeng Yu, Jinrong Xie, Kwan-Liu Ma, Kolla, Hemanth, Chen, Jacqueline H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01-10-2015; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Computational modeling; Data models; distance field; geometric modeling; in-situ processing; large-scale scientific data analytics and visualization; MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING; Octrees; parallel algorithms; Program processors; scalability; scientific simulations; spatial data structures; Surface treatment; Three-dimensional displays; parallel algorithms; geometric modeling; scientific simulations; spatial data structures; large-scale scientific data analytics and visualization; Distance field; in-situ processing; scalability
• ISSN: 1077-2626; 1941-0506
• DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2015.2417572

Computing distance fields is fundamental to many scientific and engineering applications. Distance fields can be used to direct analysis and reduce data. In this paper, we present a highly scalable method for computing 3D distance fields on massively parallel distributed-memory machines. Anew distributed spatial data structure, named parallel distance tree, is introduced to manage the level sets of data and facilitate surface tracking overtime, resulting in significantly reduced computation and communication costs for calculating the distance to the surface of interest from any spatial locations. Our method supports several data types and distance metrics from real-world applications. We demonstrate its efficiency and scalability on state-of-the-art supercomputers using both large-scale volume datasets and surface models. We also demonstrate in-situ distance field computation on dynamic turbulent flame surfaces for a petascale combustion simulation. Our work greatly extends the usability of distance fields for demanding applications.