Hybrid sort-first/sort-last rendering for dense material particle systems

Abstract

This paper describes a solution designed for efficient visualization of large and dense sets of particles, typically generated by molecular dynamics simulations in materials science. This solution is based on a hybrid distributed sort-first/sort-last architecture, and meant to work on a generic commodity cluster feeding a tiled display. The package relies on VTK framework with various extensions to achieve statistical occlusion culling, smart data partitioning and GPU-accelerated rendering.