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Results

We implemented three algorithms for timing comparisons: standard Marching Cubes (only building unconnected triangles), edge-hashing, and cache-rings. These algorithms were all timed for isosurface extraction on four radiology data sets. The first data set is a low-resolution, (32*32*32), MRI model of a head. The second data set is the same model, but at twice the resolution in each dimension, (64*64*64). The third data set is the same individual's head imaged during a different MRI scan and contains (56*512*512) nodes. The final model is the CT thorax of the Visible Human Data Set(TM) [8] and contains (512*512*168) nodes.

For the MRI data sets, we extract an isosurface values corresponding roughly to the scalp. The CT data was isosurfaced at a value more appropriate for bone. Screen images of the extracted surfaces from all of these data sets are included at the end of the paper (Figures 5-8).

All three algorithms were run on an SGI Power Onyx, with 14 90 MHz R8000 CPU's. This machine has a shared memory architecture, with 128 byte cache line, 16 Kb of L1 cache, 4 Mb of L2 cache, and 4 Gb of main memory. An L1 cache miss costs, on average, 5 cycles, and an L2 cache miss costs, on average, 100 cycles. For different timings, we utilized different numbers of the available processors. We note that the Power Onyx architecture has a main bus which can be saturated by as few as five processors during heavy utilization.




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Up: Cache-Rings for Memory Efficient Isosurface Construction
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Next: Single Processor Timings

Scientific Computing and Imaging
Wed Apr 23 17:39:06 MDT 1997