Parallel rendering algorithm for large-scale particles by wrapping surface reconstruction

A parallel rendering algorithm based on wrapping surface reconstruction was proposed for large-scale particles in distributed environments so as to visualize the particles in high quality. In the algorithm, particle clusters were represented and then rendered in the form of a series of continuous surfaces, where the distribution of the physical variable was also shown. The algorithm was parallelized in distributed environments, thus more than a hundred million particles can be visualized using a lot of processing cores. In terms of algorithm implementation, the issue of inter-block cracks during parallel computation was be solved, and the method for rapidly finding adjacent particles was presented. Meanwhile, based on visibility culling, the particle data was filtered and thus the rendering efficiency was improved. As a result, smooth surfaces with lighting can be used to expressively exhibit inner structures and physical variable distributions of particle clusters for large-scale particles. Experiment results demonstrate that using the proposed algorithm, the rendering of more than 100 million particles is realized in 5 seconds on 512 processing cores with about 60% parallel efficiency. The proposed algorithm has been successfully applied to practical simulation applications such as massively parallel non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations.