Design for scalability in 3D computer graphics architectures

Hans Holten-Lund

AbstractThis thesis describes useful methods and techniques for designing scalable hybrid parallel rendering architectures for 3D computer graphics. Various techniques for utilizing parallelism in a pipelines system are analyzed. During the Ph.D study a prototype 3D graphics architecture named Hybris has been developed. Hybris is a prototype rendering architeture which can be tailored to many specific 3D graphics applications and implemented in various ways. Parallel software implementations for both single and multi-processor Windows 2000 system have been demonstrated. Working hardware/software codesign implementations of Hybris for standard-cell based ASIC (simulated) and FPGA technologies have been demonstrated, using manual co-synthesis for translation of a Virtual Prototyping architecture specification written in C into both optimized C source for software and into to a synthesizable VHDL specification for hardware implementation. A flexible VRML 97 3D scene graph engine with a Java interface and C++ interface has been implemented to allow flexible integration of the rendering technology into Java and C++ applications. A 3D medical visualization workstation prototype (3D-Med) is examined as a case study and an application of the Hybris graphics architecture.
TypePh.D. thesis [Academic thesis]
Year2002
PublisherInformatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, DTU
AddressRichard Petersens Plads, Building 321, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
SeriesIMM-PHD-2002-97
Electronic version(s)[pdf] [ps]
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Computer Science & Engineering