A Visual Profiling System for Direct Volume Rendering
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Date
2024
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) is a crucial technique that enables interactive exploration of results from scientific computing or computer graphics. Its applications range from virtual prototyping for product design to computer-aided diagnosis in medicine. Although there are many existing DVR optimizations, they do not provide a thorough analysis of memory-specific hardware behavior. This paper introduces a profiling toolkit that enables the extraction of performance metrics, such as cache hit rates and branching, from a compiled GPU-based DVR application. The metrics are visualized in the image domain to facilitate spatial visual analysis. This paper presents a pipeline that automatically extracts memory traces using binary instrumentation, simulates the GPU memory subsystem, and models DVR-specific functionality within it. The profiler is demonstrated using the Octree-Linear Bounding Volume Hierarchy (OLBVH), and the visualized profiling metrics are explained based on the OLBVH implementation. Our discussion demonstrates that optimizing ray traversal for adaptive sampling, cache usage, branching, and global memory access has the potential to improve performance.
Description
CCS Concepts: Software and its engineering → Massively parallel systems; General and reference → Performance; Human-centered computing → Visualization toolkits
@inproceedings{10.2312:egs.20241030,
booktitle = {Eurographics 2024 - Short Papers},
editor = {Hu, Ruizhen and Charalambous, Panayiotis},
title = {{A Visual Profiling System for Direct Volume Rendering}},
author = {Buelow, Max von and Ströter, Daniel and Rak, Arne and Fellner, Dieter W.},
year = {2024},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1017-4656},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-237-0},
DOI = {10.2312/egs.20241030}
}