Interactive Volume Exploration of Petascale Microscopy Data Streams Using a Visualization-Driven Virtual Memory Approach

Markus Hadwiger, Johanna Beyer, Won-Ki Jeong and Hanspeter Pfister

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol.18, No.12 (Proceedings IEEE Scientific Visualization 2012), pp. 2285-2294 , 2012

This paper presents the first volume visualization system that scales to petascale volumes imaged as a continuous stream of high-resolution electron microscopy images. Our architecture scales to dense, anisotropic petascale volumes because it: (1) decouples construction of the 3D multi-resolution representation required for visualization from data acquisition, and (2) decouples sample access time during ray-casting from the size of the multi-resolution hierarchy. Our system is designed around a scalable multi-resolution virtual memory architecture that handles missing data naturally, does not pre-compute any 3D multi-resolution representation such as an octree, and can accept a constant stream of 2D image tiles from the microscopes. A novelty of our system design is that it is visualization-driven: we restrict most computations to the visible volume data. Leveraging the virtual memory architecture, missing data are detected during volume ray-casting as cache misses, which are propagated backwards for on-demand out-of-core processing. 3D blocks of volume data are only constructed from 2D microscope image tiles when they have actually been accessed during ray-casting. We extensively evaluate our system design choices with respect to scalability and performance, compare to previous best-of-breed systems, and illustrate the effectiveness of our system for real microscopy data from neuroscience.

@article{Hadwiger2012Petascale,
  title = {Interactive Volume Exploration of Petascale Microscopy Data Streams Using a Visualization-Driven Virtual Memory Approach},
  author = {Hadwiger, Markus and Beyer, Johanna and Jeong, Won-Ki and Pfister, Hanspeter},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings IEEE Scientific Visualization 2012)},
  year = {2012},
  volume = {18},
  number = {12},
  pages = {2285--2294}
}