PVR: high-performance volume rendering

Traditional volume rendering methods are too slow to provide interactive visualization, especially for large 3D data sets. The PVR (parallel volume rendering) system implements parallel volume rendering techniques that speed up the visualization process. Moreover, it helps computational scientists, engineers, and physicians to more effectively apply volume rendering to visualization tasks. The authors describe the PVR system that they have developed in a collaboration between the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Sandia National Laboratories. PVR is an attempt to provide an easy-to-use portable system for high performance visualization with the speed required for interactivity and steering. The current version of PVR consists of about 25000 lines of C and Tcl/Tk code. It has been used at Stony Brook, Sandia, and Brookhaven National Labs to visualize large data sets for over a year.